Sounds on the margins of language, at the heart of interaction

Abstract

What do people do with sniffs, lip-smacks, grunts, moans, sighs, whistles and clicks, where these are not part of their language's phonetic inventory? They use them, we shall show, as irreplaceable elements in performing all kinds of actions - from managing the structural flow of interaction to indexing states of mind, and much more besides. In this introductory essay we outline the phonetic and embodied interactional underpinnings of language, and argue that greater attention should be paid to its non-lexical elements. Data in English and Estonian