Tastes of Talk: Qualia and the moral flavor of signs

Abstract

This essay explores the semiotic processes by which speakers attribute sensuous qualities – e.g. lightness, dryness, straightness and others – to speech registers. Language ideologies create indexical relations linking linguistic forms to typical personae, activities and values in social life; they also construct other semiotic relations that enable speakers to attribute taste, texture, smell, sound, or shape to speech. Such extended, cross-modal, sensuous metaphors are taken up as lived experience, as part of larger frameworks of cultural value. By extending several Peircean concepts, the essay shows how speakers become persuaded that such sensuous properties of speech are existentially real. Two pedagogical genres from 19th and 20th century Hungary illustrate how properties of speech are reproduced, either via explicit instruction or as displayed in the parallelism of narrative. Both genres construct speech qualia as constitutive moves in moral and political projects that become more persuasive through the display of valued qualia.