Talk:by God

part of speech

... I would have thought Interjection, not Adverb... ---> Tooironic 22:44, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning it. I feel that interjection is overused and am floundering toward a rational delineation of what a true interjection might be.

I don't think Interjection is right in all uses of this phrase.

BTW, I think some real citations would help.

It seems to me that this is used mostly as either an oath or as an intensifier. The intensifier use is derived from the oath, I think. It does not really have any other "meanings" except that the particular components of the oath, if still visible, my determine its effect on particular audiences. In the cases where it is most clearly an oath, it is an oath to a proposition. As such it seems to be something like a sentence adverb or possibly sometimes a modal adverb (?).

In some cases it is merely an intensifier, but it is not a grammatical isolate and therefore not an interjection, but again rather more a sentence adverb, I think.

OTOH, in the cases where it is not used as an oath or an intensifier and is a grammatical isolate, it might be considered an interjection. "Surprise" is often considered an emotion, so the use to express surprise seems most likely to be truly interjective. I am more used to hearing "my god", "holy [X]", "sweet [X]", and similar expressions, but this seems to be the same. DCDuring TALK 01:23, 19 March 2011 (UTC)