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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...