Abstract

While affect has been long studied in fields such as psychology, it has been mainly in recent years that sociolinguists have started looking at the role of affect in explaining variation in language and speech. A possible factor explaining the situation may be linked to the ethical and practical difficulties of analysing affect. In this talk, I suggest that mediatised speech is ripe with data that enables us to shed light on the relationship between affect and speech in a range of ways. Here, my focus will be on how the vocal has been used in the media to construct morality and whether speakers/listeners show any sensitivities to the patterns that emerge across a range of media. I will also show that the vocal construction of morality intersects with gender, sexuality, and age, which provides a complex mosaic of phonatory profiles recruited to portray not only morality in a broader sense (good vs evil) but also in a more nuanced manner (What kind of good? What kind of evil?).

Bionote

Míša Hejná is a phonetician and a sociolinguist. She frequently works on voice quality and directs the interdisciplinary Centre of Voice Studies at Aarhus University.