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 ...

This paper questions the relevance of the concept of « parts of the speech » regarding interjection. From the psychomecanical theory of word, Damourette and Pichon's taxinomy and K. Mantchev's ...

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 ...