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 ...

What would you say if you suddenly stubbed your toe on a doorframe? Depending on how much it hurt, you might yelp in pain, unleash a stream of expletives—or utter a very specific exclamation such as ...

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 ...