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Feast your eyes on a small segment of the total number of interjections in English:  Aha, Hurray, Oh, Ah, Aw, Ouch, Wow, Alas, Boo, Hey, Oh my God, Ahem, Bah, Cheers, Hmm, Huh, Huzzah, Oops, Yay, Agreement, Amen, Argh, Awesome, Boy….

Interjections may be exclamatory, quizzical, condemnatory, laudatory, and so forth and so on.  They may convey pain, delight, dismay; approbation, disapproval.

Some interjections are neutral:  uh, um.

Some are positive:  woo-hoo, bravo.

Some are negative:  duh, which is disdainful, demeaning, and even insulting.

"Huh? The Valuable Role of Interjections." Holmes, Bob. Knowable Magazine | Annual Reviews, February 24, 2025.

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 conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren’t as articulate as they’d like to be.

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 tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself — and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.

“Here is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, “that turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.”

When we come to the next paragraph of Bob Holmes' thought-provoking article, the question of spoken vs. written language, this is something that lies at the heart of my own preoccupation with written vernacular, which is closer to spoken language than classical and literary language.

For most of the history of linguistics, scholars have tended to focus on written language, in large part because that’s what they had records of. But once recordings of conversation became available, they could begin to analyze spoken language the same way as writing.

When they did, they observed that interjections — that is, short utterances of just a word or two that are not part of a larger sentence — were ubiquitous in everyday speech. “One in every seven utterances are one of these things,” says Dingemanse, who explores the use of interjections in the 2024 Annual Review of Linguistics. “You’re going to find one of those little guys flying by every 12 seconds. Apparently, we need them.”

Many of these interjections serve to regulate the flow of conversation. “Think of it as a tool kit for conducting interactions,” says Dingemanse. “If you want to have streamlined conversations, these are the tools you need.” An um or uh from the speaker, for example, signals that they’re about to pause, but aren’t finished speaking. A quick huh? or what? from the listener, on the other hand, can signal a failure of communication that the speaker needs to repair.

On the other hand, interjections are often used as filler words to give the speaker time to think of the next words he wants to say, and these come in a withering variety of personal favorites.  Believe it or not, a classics professor of mine at Dartmouth would say "oink, oink" when he was thinking of what to say next.  The first few times I heard him say "oink, oink" in the middle of a sentence about Socrates or Plato, I almost couldn't believe my ears and had to stifle a burst of laughter.

I've also heard the following used as idiosyncratic interjections:  "OK" (by the speaker or listener), "fantastic" (by the listener), "precisely" (by the listener), the first sotto voce the latter two with exaggerated emphasis.

Unbelievably, I know a professor who is so addicted to the "f" word that they use it as an interjection (as well as a verb and an adjective ["f—in"]) even in faculty meetings.

The article delves into many more aspects of interjections, such as "continuers" (mm-hmm) and "feedback" (wow, yeah, eh?).

Holmes concludes with a biggy: 

Can AI learn to use interjections?

To make artificial intelligence sound more natural, developers are building interjections into its responses. Google’s NotebookLM, for example, offers the option of summarizing information — say, one or more scientific papers — in the form of a podcast hosted by two AI-generated hosts.

On first hearing, the program does a pretty good job: The hosts joke, laugh and insert Mm-hmm and Wow! at superficially appropriate times. But to the ears of a trained linguist, there’s something amiss. (Listen to an example.)  [VHM:  don't miss it!]

“They almost work, but not quite,” says theoretical linguist Martina Wiltschko of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies. “They kind of remind me of AI art, where there’s too many fingers. You don’t see it at first, but if you look carefully, you see that something’s wrong.”

One tell is that when the listener mm-hmms or laughs, the speaker pauses while they do so, lending a slightly creepy note to the simulated conversation. “To me, it’s almost like the uncanny valley,” says Wiltschko. “It’s close, but it’s not quite close enough.”

The biggest deficiency, though, is a robust sense of who knows what in the conversation. The AI hosts seem to flip back and forth on which one knows which pieces of information.

“It’s not just what they’re saying, it’s who’s talking in what context, and who knows what,” says Wiltschko. “I would be really surprised if the AI could ever handle that — and human beings handle that with ease.”

All of which leads me to give vent to my favorite Nepali expression, "bāphre bāph!" and to resort to my habitual Cantonese exclamation-continuer "wah!.

 

Selected readings

• "The evolution of verbal interpolations" (7/6/24) — with valuable bibliography
• "Slang and fillers not allowed" (10/7/21)
• "I'm (like)" (8/30/21)
• "'I feel like'" (8/24/13)
• "I feel like 'I feel like'" (9/2/21)
• "Like thanks" (11/26/15)
• "'Like' youth and sex" (6/28/11)
• "Like, a Christmas gift card" (12/28/06)
• "That, that, that…" (1/24/16) — the (in)famous Mandarin demonstrative filler, "neige, neige, neige"
• "'That, that, that…', part 2" (8/28/20)
• "'That, that, that…', part 3" (9/14/20)
• "A Chinese analog to English 'you know'" (11/22/19)
• "'Bāphre bāph!' — my favorite Nepali expression" (8/12/18)
• "The wonder of Cantonese particles" (5/14/18)
• "New Singaporean and Hong Kong terms in the OED" (5/12/16) — Cantonese "wah"

[Thanks to Ted McClure]

April 19, 2025 @ 7:31 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Fillers and pause words, Interjections and exclamations

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