The 2025-2026 Linguistics Colloquium series continues on Monday, April 13, with a talk by Teresa Pratt (San Francisco State University) titled "Language and affect in interaction and performance." The talk will take place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom from 3:10-4:30pm, and the abstract is as follows:
This talk invokes and invites ways of thinking about affect and language. Numerous conventionalized
(Western) epistemologies treat mood as ephemeral, and emotions as individualized experiences. But affect is
a social and intersubjective phenomenon accomplished through interaction. Affect thus reflects and
reproduces conventionalized displays of emotion and also the ideological rendering of styles and personae.
Further, affect is always already implicated in the embedded racialized, gendered, and classed meanings that
map from and onto emergent social meaning in interaction. Of interest to me, and to this interdisciplinary
convening of scholars, is the fact that affect is accomplished across multiple semiotic channels.
Drawing on data from ethnographic fieldwork, I examine the intertwining of linguistic and bodily practices,
and illustrate how assemblages thereof constitute the semiotics of affect. Among adolescents at a California
high school, affects of ‘chill’ and ‘tough’ are culturally valuable and also, semiotic achievements. ‘Chill’ affect
is 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).
More recent work analyzes TikTok creators’ parodic performance of Karens, the label used to name and
critique the trope of middle-aged white women who enact and exact white supremacy in interactional
moments. In both lived interactions and ideological abstraction, Karen represents the ever-present threat of
racist violence, and social media creators frequently perform Karen parodies using a range of linguistic and
embodied elements. These elements include phonetic resources such as pitch and speech rate, enregistered
discursive resources (e.g. ‘I need to speak to your manager’), as well as bodily displays of energy (e.g. fast,
repetitive gestures; tensely pursed lips).
Notably, across both ethnographic and media analyses, many of the linguistic and bodily resources which
cohere and circulate affective meaning are iconized (Inoue 2004, Calder 2019b): low pitch, creaky voice, and
slow speech rate are regularly iconized as low-energy, whereas high pitch and fast speech rate are used to
perform high-energy affect. Similarly, overall bodily movement (more/less) in addition to the kinds of
movement (repetitive gestures vs. tensed facial features) are recruited to cohere these alternate energy-
based affective styles.
After presenting my empirical work, I will connect these ideas with decolonial theory and praxis. I suggest
that centering affect and the body works to resist mind-body dualism that has dominated much of 20th
century linguistic theory, and accordingly the colonial logics which elevate and separate the civilized(able),
‘rational’ mind from the unruly body and its emotions.
References
Inoue, Miyako. 2004. What Does Language Remember?: Indexical Inversion and the Naturalized History of
Japanese Women. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14: 39-56.
Calder, J. 2019. From sissy to sickening: The indexical landscape of/s/in SoMa, San Francisco. Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology 29: 332-358.
