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Prosody and ideologies of embodiment: Variation in the use of pitch and articulation rate among fitness instructors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2020

Lewis Esposito Open the ORCID record for Lewis Esposito [Opens in a new window]  and
Chantal Gratton
Lewis Esposito*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, USA
Chantal Gratton
Affiliation:
Stanford University, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Lewis Esposito Department of Linguistics Stanford University Margaret Jacks Hall, Building 460 Stanford, CA94305, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

This article discusses semiotic connections among linguistic prosody, the body, and forms of physical activity. A quantitative study of the instructional styles of bodybuilding and yoga instructors on YouTube shows that bodybuilding instructors employ faster articulation rates and higher pitch (F0) than yoga instructors. We argue that articulation rate and pitch become semiotically linked to notions of energy, and the differences in the instructors’ styles are rooted in differences in levels of embodied energy that bodybuilding and yoga are assumed to require. Instructors employ linguistic features that reflect these ideologies of their activities, and in doing so, present themselves as embodied instantiations of their respective practices. This study shows that ideologies of the body as a physically active doer of things provide an important source for the generation of iconic, energy-related meanings. Crucially, we show that ideological notions of energy and embodied iconicity can drive group-level patterns of linguistic variation. (Prosody, iconicity, style, embodiment, social meaning, ideology)*

Type
Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 211 - 236
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

This project grew out of discussions we had with Penny Eckert, and we are incredibly grateful for the support and insight she offered along the way. We are also grateful to Rob Podesva, Qing Zhang, members of Stanford's SocioLunch, the audience at NWAV 47, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions. Any and all errors remain our own.

References

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