Abstract
Based on a corpus-based approach, this paper focuses on the topic of Italian discourse markers and interjections in a contact language situation. The corpus consists of data from 65 multilingual speakers attending German-language high schools in South Tyrol. The paper examines the use of the Italian-origin markers ma(h) (roughly corresponding to ‘but’, ‘well’, ‘huh’) and boh (‘I do not know’) – which have been classified in the literature as discourse markers, but also as interjections – in otherwise Standard German speech. First, this contribution aims to show the frequencies of mah and boh as well as some distributional features in German. Then, the different functions are described and illustrated by examples. Findings show that the Italian forms co-occur alongside their German equivalents. An indepth qualitative analysis of 128 instances reveals that mah and boh share some conversional functions, however not all.