ABSTRACT
Like other Dravidian languages, Malayalam is rich in expressives and expressive constructions. Expressives in Dravidian consist of ideophones, onomatopoetic expressions, echo words, exclamations, interjections and grammatical and lexical reduplicative constructions and the like. This chapter provides a discussion on a set of Malayalam sentences with expressives to substantiate certain random appearance of morphosyntactic characters. Type of verbal expressive and the aspect of the verb in Malayalam covary. Optative and hortative expressives are the same in morphosyntactic structure and their distribution is discontinuous. There are primary and secondary interjections in Malayalam. Primary interjections are short words used exclusively as expressives. On the contrary, secondary interjections are morphologically more complex than primary interjections, and they belong to other word classes and function as interjections as well. Interjections occur in the initial part of a sentence and modify the whole sentence and have emotive, cognitive, conative, and phatic functions.
