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.

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 ...

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 ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract In Western philosophy and linguistic theory, interjectionsthat is, words like oof, ouch, and bleahhave traditionally been understood to ...

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 ...