Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the ...

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the ...

Finn accepts a challenge by Feifei to speak using only interjections. Does he manage to do this? Listen to the programme to find out. The sounds are followed by facial expressions Feifei: Hello, Finn.

Facebook was in the news last week for introducing a choice of five emoji you can use to tag a post or other online object that inspires some emotion in you. Formerly, your only recourse was the ...

Interjections primarily express emotion — often in a way that doesn’t seem very sophisticated. But Anne Curzan, an English professor at the University of Michigan and regular contributor to the Lingua ...

One night last week, I explained to a youthful hotel desk clerk that my family and I were interested in playing cards up in our room, then asked her if the hotel had a deck. She made this sound:. Then ...

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation as well as ...