37.3192, FYI: STAL Seminar: Martina Wiltschko, "The Sounds of Affect"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3192. Mon Oct 05 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3192, FYI: STAL Seminar: Martina Wiltschko, "The Sounds of Affect"

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Date: 05-Oct-2026
From: Dan Zeman [danczeman at gmail.com]
Subject: STAL Seminar: Martina Wiltschko, "The Sounds of Affect"


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. The invited speaker is Martina Wiltschko (ICREA/Pompeu Fabra
University), who will give a talk entitled "The Sounds of Affect" (see
the abstract below). 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 stalnetwork at gmail.com for the Zoom link.
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.

Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language
                     Semantics




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