Simon Fraser University
Engaging the World

Department of Linguistics

May 11, 2023

The First Annual Yvonne Becker Colloquium

The Becker Colloquium was established to commemorate Yvonne Joan Kathleen Becker, an alumnus and significant benefactor of SFU Linguistics.

Event Details

Thursday, May 11th at 12:30pm-1:30pm in RCB 7402, Burnaby campus.

Program

  • 12:30 PM
    Welcome and introductions
  • 12:35 PM
    Acknowledgement of the Becker Prize recipient
  • 12:40 PM
    Lecture by Teresa Pratt
  • 1:15 PM
    Q&A with Teresa Pratt
  • 1:30 PM
    Thank you messages and reception

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

Teresa Pratt is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the English Department at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Teresa joined SFSU after teaching for two years in at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany during her postdoctoral studies, and was lecturer faculty at SFSU in 2017 while she completed her Ph.D. work at Stanford University.

Teresa uses ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods to examine how linguistic forms and bodily practices co-construct personas and styles. In her most recent work, she explores teenagers' linguistic and bodily practices of 'chill' or 'loud' affect, and how affect connects with students' positioning in the high school political economy. 

Currently, Teresa teaches courses introducing language structure and on sociolinguistics, the history of English, phonetics and phonology, and language in relation to notions of race and colonization.

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.