{"id":1238122,"date":"2025-03-09T07:05:24","date_gmt":"2025-03-09T11:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1238122"},"modified":"2025-03-09T07:05:24","modified_gmt":"2025-03-09T11:05:24","slug":"huh-the-valuable-role-of-interjections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1238122","title":{"rendered":"Huh? The valuable role of interjections"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you\u2019ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words\u2014<em>mm-hmm<\/em>, <em>um<\/em>, <em>huh?<\/em> and the like\u2014that don\u2019t 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\u2019t as articulate as they\u2019d like to be.<\/p>\n<p>But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be <a href=\"https:\/\/knowablemagazine.org\/content\/article\/mind\/2025\/importance-of-interjections-in-speech-podcast\">crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation<\/a> as well as tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself\u2014and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHere is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,\u201d says <a href=\"https:\/\/markdingemanse.net\/\">Mark Dingemanse<\/a>, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, \u201cthat turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2025\/03\/huh-the-valuable-role-of-interjections\/\">Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2025\/03\/huh-the-valuable-role-of-interjections\/#comments\">Comments<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you\u2019ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words\u2014mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like\u2014that don\u2019t convey any information about the topic of the conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1238122\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,44,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1238122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ars-technica","category-technology","category-unfiltered-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1238122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1238122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1238122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1238122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}