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.

Some parts of speech get lots of attention from language researchers. Nouns and verbs certainly do, and this seems appropriate, given that they refer to the objects and the actions that make up our ...

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 ...

From "ouch" to "aïe", human expressions of pain are strikingly similar worldwide, revealing something fundamental about how humans develop language. We're all familiar with the words we shout out when ...