School of Foreign Languages, Yangtze University, Jingzhou, China. Interjections in everyday conversations routinely function as pragmatic markers, especially when they are used to initiate utterances.

Interjections in everyday conversations routinely function as pragmatic markers, especially when they are used to initiate utterances. In turn-initial position, the overall incidence of interjections ...

Interjections are short words or phrases that express a feeling or emotion instead of a concrete meaning. When used in a sentence, interjections are usually grammatically independent from adjacent ...

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 ...

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 ...