“Oh yeah, one more thing: It’s gonna be huge.”: On the use of oh yeah in journalistic writing

This paper investigates the use of oh yeah in written prose found in American journalistic articles using corpus data. It demonstrates that such uses are a recent phenomenon that have risen in frequency starting at end of the 20th century. These new written functions are adapted to the written medium, but still resemble how oh yeah is used in speech. These developments contribute further insights to the changes occurring in journalistic writing. Furthermore, this paper concentrates on how oh yeah is adapted into journalistic writing to inject an interpersonal flair into the articles in which it is used. The timing of these developments also indicates a later wave of change to journalism that has been until now under-discussed.