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 ...

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 ...

There are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, each offering unique ways to express human emotion. But do certain emotions show regularities in their vocal expression across languages? In ...

We all know what words we might shout out when we stub a toe or touch something hot. For those of us who speak English, it’s probably “ouch”. But what kinds of “pain words” (or “interjections”) do ...

Spend some time on the Internet, and you’ll start to see a peculiar usage of the word fail popping up everywhere. A conservative blog posts an image of a United States-Russian diplomatic agreement ...

Pain interjections can indeed be traced back to nonlinguistic vocalisations. We all know what words we might shout out when we stub a toe or touch something hot. For those of us who speak English, ...