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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

An interdisciplinary team explored possible regularities in vocal emotional expressions by comparing expressive interjections, such as 'wow,' to nonlinguistic vocalizations, such as screams and cries, ...

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 ...