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 ...

Many of us oldsters remember being taught in school that there are eight parts of speech, but I find that, when I try to remember what I was taught, I usually come up with nine.  When I look at ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be ...