The Sounds of Affect

Martina Wiltschko (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home), an international and interdisciplinary network whose primary aim is to promote work on slurs, pejoratives, expressives and evaluative terms from less studied languages, invites you to the first talk of the 2026-2027 academic year to be given by Martina Wiltschko (ICREA/Pompeu Fabra University), entitled "The Sounds of Affect". The event will take place online on Monday, OCTOBER 12, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time (CET), and is part of the of STAL network seminar series (program here: https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to participate, please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link. Below you can find the abstract of the talk.

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

The empirical goal of this talk is to explore the use of a set of emotive expressions in Spanish, namely ah, ay, oh, oy, uh, and uy. These expressions have been previously described as indicating both unexpectedness of an event (ah, oh, uh) as well as a subjective evaluation of the unexpected event (ay, oy, uy; Montes 1999). Thus, these forms encode both epistemic and affective content, a defining property of emotive markers cross-linguistically. My analytical goal is to present an analysis of the form, function and distribution of these markers. I argue that they belong to a set of categories that belong to the grammar of interaction (Wiltschko 2021). Specifically, I analyze them as speaker oriented pro-forms which indicate the note-worthiness of the event, object, or utterance that triggered the utterance (Wiltschko 2024). This accounts for their epistemic content. As for their affective content, I propose that it derives from the vowel-quality and hence is best analysed as an articulatory gesture with ideophonic meaning (Thompson & Do 2019). Specifically, ah, oh, uh are associated with increasing noteworthiness (ah being neutral and uh being highest on the note-worthiness scale, Montes 1999). This increase in noteworthiness is mirrored by the increase in effort in producing these vowels, both in terms of tongue position and lip rounding. As for the subjective evaluation, I argue that it, too, is ideophonically expressed through the glide, which is produced by an inward movement of the articulators which in turn mirrors the inward character of a subjective evaluation.