We generally understand that interjections express sudden feelings and emotions such as pleasure, anger, disappointment, shock, surprise, and excitement. Formally, these words often proceed with punctuation marks, which are most often but not always exclamation points, and they are often ‘thrown’ in between sentences. However, exact definitions are not so precise once we look at tags in corpora.
A search in the NOW corpus for the frequency of interjections:
_UH
1 YES 1588669
2 NO 1236715
Although sometimes classified as interjections, these words (YES NO) do not (always) express emotion or act as calls for attention; they are not adverbs because they do not qualify any verb, adjective, or adverb. They are sometimes classified as a part of speech in their own right: sentence words or word sentences.
The most common collocate of ‘yes’ is ‘yes’. Here is an example that clearly expresses emotion:
I knew you would.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
Yes! Oh.
*Note that there is no entry in the English Profile or Collins dictionary for ‘yes’ used to express emotion which suggests this is not an A1 cando. ‘Yeah’ is listed at A2 as an exclamation.
‘No’ as an exclamation is listed in the Collins dictionary at A2.
express shock or disappointment at something you have just been told.
For example:
3 OH 660760
Oh my God, I can’t believe it!
4 YEAH 490314
5 HEY 251322 more repetition:
6 HI 198411
7 HELLO 164454
8 WOW 160706
9 AR 93860
10 AH 83664
11 HA 82685
12 UM 67610
13 OOPS 57839
14 UH 57485
15 ALAS 53637
16 GOODBYE 50779
17 YEP 47492
18 DEAR 43188
19 O 39962
20 NOPE 35945
21 COR 35245
22 EY 35112
23 TA 35055
24 EH 32694
25 YO 31715
26 MM 30395
27 LO 29373
28 CHEERS 28898
29 SH 28751
30 BLAH 28279
31 GEE 27514
32 GOSH 27428
33 OOH 27347
34 TT 27285
35 NA 26683
36 BYE 24709
37 HUH 24044
38 OCH 22803
39 EE 22052
40 HO 21957
41 EUREKA 21304
42 NAH 21136
43 HMM 20346
44 AMEN 20311
45 BRAVO 20191
46 YA 19873
47 OLE 18334
48 YUM 17999
49 AHA 15993
50 AY 15171
51 WHOA 15034
52 YUP 13808
53 DAMN 13553
54 AW 13420
55 MMM 13138
56 OUCH 12546
57 YEA 12438
58 HAHA 11839
59 UGH 11797
60 POW 11682
61 BOO 11679
62 AYE 11306
63 AHEM 11081
64 OI 9946
65 HOY 9401
66 CRIKEY 8964
67 LEAH 8888
68 OO 8801
69 UMM 8756
70 NAY 8098
71 BEHOLD 7824
72 AND 7813
73 BAH 7607
74 PRESTO 7584
75 U-M 7501
76 TUT 7460
77 WHAM 7120
78 POP 6885
79 FAREWELL 6221
80 PHEW 6203
81 QUALCOMM 6138
82 WOH 5910
83 AHH 5369
84 WHOOP 5313
85 SHOO-IN 5065
86 GEES 5010
87 GOODNIGHT 4994
88 HALLELUJAH 4814
89 HOORAY 4788
90 ACH 4637
91 AWW 4615
92 OY 4409
93 OPRAH 4353
94 DAMMIT 4231
95 SABAH 3985
96 ZZ 3951
97 MHM 3896
98 OOO 3833
99 REBEKAH 3715
100 HOI 3678