"Oh"

How do we express the act of listening through language? Often, it’s through small, easily overlooked sounds—“mm-hmm,” “yeah,” “right,” “I see.” In linguistics, these backchannels, or response tokens, are known as phatic expressions: they don’t carry semantic meaning, but serve as vital relational tools. This live lecture-performance with Maia Chao, Erik DeLuca, Matt Evans, and Amirtha Kidambi, will animate theories of discourse analysis, performed by a new music ensemble specializing in improvisation and collective composition. Linguist Daniel Midgley will give insights into the expressions and gestures we use to construct and interpret meaning. Audience members will consider questions like: How might we find poetry in the everyday utterance? This performance is an invitation to reflect on how power circulates in conversation, and how the subtlest inflections—an audible exhale, a repetition, a pause—might reveal the ways meaning is made and unmade.