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The First Annual Yvonne Becker Colloquium

To commemorate Yvonne Joan Kathleen Becker, an alumnus and significant benefactor of the department, the Becker Colloquium was established in 2023. 

2023 Becker Colloquium: Affect and embodiment in sociolinguistics, presented by Dr. Teresa Pratt

Abstract

This talk argues for a focus on affect and embodiment in sociolinguistics. Though conventionalized (Western) notions treat mood as ephemeral and emotions as individualized experiences, linguistic and bodily practices of enacting affect are central to linguistic style, and to social meaning-making more generally. Affect courses through the interactional moments wherein we produce and interpret language, and in doing so it constitutes and reflects both conventionalized displays of emotion as well as the ideological rendering of styles and personae. Further, both affect and the body are always already implicated in the racialized, gendered, and classed social meanings enacted by speakers and interpreted by listeners. Drawing on sociolinguistic and ethnographic research conducted in a California high school, I examine the intertwining use of sociolinguistic signs and bodily practices, and illustrate how assemblages thereof both reflect and reproduce affect. For example, among the adolescents studied, ‘chill’ affect is highly valued, and enacted through both sociolinguistic signs (e.g. creaky voice, vowel quality, vowel space) and bodily practices (e.g. jaw setting, posture) to reproduce styles laden with ideological meaning (Pratt 2021, 2023). After presenting my recent empirical work, I will share the ways that I am currently thinking through and integrating these ideas with decolonial theory and praxis. I suggest that centering affect and the body works to resist the mind-body dualism that has dominated much of 20th century linguistic theory, and likewise the colonial logics which elevate and separate the civilized(able), ‘rational’ mind from the unruly body and its emotions.