\n<\/p>\n
\u273d<\/p>\n
LISTEN CAREFULLY TO a spoken conversation and you\u2019ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words\u2014\u201cmm-hmm,\u201d \u201cum,\u201d \u201chuh?,\u201d 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
But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be\u00a0crucial traffic signals<\/a> to regulate the flow of conversation\u00a0as 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 \u201cHere is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,\u201d says\u00a0Mark 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 For most of the history of linguistics, scholars have tended to focus on written language, in large part because that\u2019s what they had records of. But once recordings of conversation became available, they could begin to analyze\u00a0spoken language<\/a>\u00a0the same way as writing.<\/p>\n When they did, they observed that interjections\u2014that is, short utterances of just a word or two that are not part of a larger sentence\u2014were ubiquitous in everyday speech. \u201cOne in every seven utterances are one of these things,\u201d says Dingemanse, who\u00a0explores the use of interjections<\/a> in the 2024\u00a0Annual Review of Linguistics<\/em>. \u201cYou\u2019re going to find one of those little guys flying by every 12 seconds. Apparently, we need them.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of these interjections serve to regulate the flow of conversation. \u201cThink of it as a tool kit for conducting interactions,\u201d says Dingemanse. \u201cIf you want to have streamlined conversations, these are the tools you need.\u201d An \u201cum\u201d\u00a0or\u00a0\u201cuh\u201d\u00a0from the speaker, for example, signals that they\u2019re about to pause but aren\u2019t finished speaking. A quick \u201chuh?\u201d\u00a0or \u201cwhat?\u201d\u00a0from the listener, on the other hand, can signal a failure of communication that the speaker needs to repair.<\/p>\n That need seems to be universal: In a survey of 31 languages around the world, Dingemanse and his colleagues found that all of them used<\/a> a short, neutral syllable similar to \u201chuh?\u201d as a repair signal, probably because it\u2019s quick to produce. \u201cIn that moment of difficulty, you\u2019re going to need the simplest possible question word, and that\u2019s what \u2018huh?\u2019 is,\u201d says Dingemanse. \u201cWe think all societies will stumble on this, for the same reason.\u201d<\/p>\n