Simon Fraser University
Engaging the World

The Department of Linguistics invites you to the first annual Yvonne Becker Colloquium!

Join us on Thursday, May 11th at 12:30pm to honour this year’s recipient of the Becker Essay Prize and to hear from guest lecturer Teresa Pratt on the topic of affect and embodiment in sociolinguistics.

ABOUT THE BECKER ESSAY PRIZE

The Becker Essay Prize is an award established by the Department of Linguistics to commemorate Yvonne Joan Kathleen Becker, an alumnus and significant benefactor of the department.

Every year, the department will receive essay submissions from undergraduate students undertaking a major, joint major or minor in Linguistics, whose work stands out for the originality of its ideas, understanding of linguistic concepts and clarity of expression.

The selected recipient will receive $500 and be honoured at the annual Yvonne Becker Colloquium.

Learn more about the eligibility criteria and submission process here.

About the Guest Lecturer

About the Lecture

Affect and embodiment in sociolinguistics

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.