SEPTEMBER 23, 2024
Bianca Cepollaro (University Vita-Salute San Raffaele), Filippo Domaneschi (University of Genoa) and Isidora Stojanovic (Pompeu Fabra University/CNRS)
"Slurs across Syntactic Realizations. Experimental Evidence on Predicative vs. Ad-nominal Uses of Slurs"
ABSTRACT:
The research on slurs has been largely striving to understand how slurs encode their pejorative meaning – whether via truth-conditional meaning, or conventional implicature, or presupposition, or otherwise. Less attention has been paid to the question of what kind of pejorative content slurs express or convey. It is the latter question that we undertake in the present talk, and we do so by means of an experimental study conducted over slurring terms in Italian, in line with our earlier studies on pejoratives in Italian (“When is it ok to call someone a jerk? An experimental investigation of expressives”, Synthese 2020, and “Literally ‘a jerk’: an experimental investigation of expressives in predicative position”, Language and Cognition, forthcoming). We explore three options: (1) pejorative content is agent-oriented, that is, reflects the negative attitudes of some salient agent, typically the speaker; (2) pejorative content is target-oriented, that is, brings to salience the negative properties of the person(s) referred to with the slur; (3) pejorative content is intersubjective, that is, reflects the negative attitudes of not only the agent but further conversational participants, or even a larger linguistic community. Crucially, we look at slurs both in predicative position (X is a -slur-) and adnominal position (That -slur- X is Y). Our results show that the agent-oriented option is the preferred one for adnominal uses, while the target-oriented option, for predicative uses: this suggests that the pejorative content encoded by slurs is not uniform but varies along a syntactic dimension.
OCTOBER 14, 2024
Matteo Colombo (Tilburg University) and Giovanni Cassani (Tilburg University)
"In the Thick of It. Do Thick Terms Constitute a Distinctive Class of Affectively-charged Language?"
ABSTRACT:
Words like ‘courageous’, ‘clever’, ‘gullible’, ‘smelly’ and ‘tasty’ are examples of what philosophers call thick terms, which have a significant degree of descriptive content and are evaluatively loaded, too. Thick terms have been contrasted with purely evaluative terms like ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, and descriptive terms like ‘Dutch’, ‘tall’ and ‘pink’. Despite the amount of attention thick terms have received in philosophy, however, it is unclear whether they constitute a homogeneous class of evaluative terms with characteristic psycholinguistic properties, and whether the psycholinguistic properties of thick terms are reducible to their “valence norms” (i.e., the degree of pleasantness/unpleasantness elicited by a word). In this talk, we explore these two questions based on computational modelling and behavioural data in English, Dutch and Italian. Our results indicate that, compared to other affectively-charged words, thick terms have characteristic psycholinguistic and information properties irreducible to valence norms.
NOVEMBER 4, 2024
Nicolás Lo Guercio (CONICET/University of Buenos Aires)
"Maximize Expressivity!"
ABSTRACT:
In interpreting utterances language users frequently compare the sentence used by the speaker with a set of alternative sentences that she could have used instead. Arguably, such comparison can have a significant impact on the interpretation, the grammaticality, or the felicity of the utterance. In this talk I focus on scalar inferences, alternative-based inferences that arise as a result of the comparison between sentences mainly in terms of their informativeness. In this regard, a lot of research has focused on scalar implicatures and anti-presuppositions, where the hearer compares alternatives regarding their at-issue and presuppositional content respectively. To my knowledge, however, no attention has been paid to differences in informativeness regarding expressive meaning, arguably a type of non-presuppositional, non-at-issue content. Thus, for example, the sentence “That idiot Nicolás lost his keys” is intuitively more informative than “Nicolás lost his keys” in terms of its expressive content. The question arises whether expressives may license expressive scalar inferences (ESIs) parallel to scalar implicatures and anti-presuppositions, and under what circumstances. In this talk I argue, based on the discussion of epithets and certain honorifics (e.g., the Spanish honorific 'don') that expressive utterances may license ESIs under the right circumstances, and I suggest that the data can be accounted for by postulating a principle called Maximize expressivity! Some expressives, however, e.g. expressive adjectives and group pejoratives, do not seem to license ESIs. In the second part of the talk I attempt to account for these apparent counterexamples in a way that is compatible with Maximize expressivity!: on the one hand, I maintain that expressive adjectives do not license ESIs because of the particularities of their semantics; on the other hand, I contend that group pejoratives do not license ESIs because they are (sociolinguistically) marked.
JANUARY 20, 2025
Kristen Syrett (Rutgers University) & Misha Becker (UNC-Chapel Hill)
"How Language Supports the Acquisition of Predicates of Mental States and Emotions"
ABSTRACT:
As children acquire adjectives, they must tackle the challenge that while some properties denoted by these predicates are stable and visually salient (e.g., color, shape), others (e.g., emotions and mental states like happy, sad, or confident) lack a reliable physical correlate, and are typically only inferable via second order characteristics. How, then, do children master the meanings of adjectives that label these fleeting, internal, abstract states? One answer may lie in the very linguistic environment in which these adjectives appear. Previous work in language acquisition has documented the power of the frame and complementation patterns for verb learning, subject form for control and raising verbs, count syntax for acquiring nouns, and adverbial modification for different types of gradable adjectives. In this talk, I draw on this prior work to lay a foundation for a series of experiments investigating how children might recruit both syntactic and semantic cues in the input to narrow the hypothesis space for emotion/mental state adjective meaning. I begin by presenting extensive evidence from CHILDES corpora showing that while these adjectives are relatively infrequent in the input, they diverge from other adjectives (e.g., those of color, shape, size, or multidimensional subjective adjectives) in their preference of syntactic position, their requirements on subject animacy, and their syntactic complementation patterns. Next, I present data from a set of word guessing studies using scripted dialogues that both adults and older children (age 5-8) recruit the type of subject and syntactic complement to constrain adjective meaning. Finally, I present a set of binary forced-choice word learning studies putting emotion/mental state against color and shape showing once again, that the presence of an animate subject and syntactic complement points to an emotion/mental state adjective meaning, this time for preschoolers. Taken together, these experiments—the first to document the combined power of syntax and semantics for acquiring abstract adjective meaning—make connections between emotion/mental state adjectives and mental state verbs in word learning, thereby further demonstrating the potential universality of syntactic bootstrapping, and the role of language itself in focusing young word learners’ attention on mental aspects of the situation that are not readily observable.
FEBRUARY 10, 2025
Thomas Wier (Free University of Tbilisi)
"Expressivity in Georgian and other Caucasian Languages"
ABSTRACT:
Expressive and ideophonic constructions conveying ‘marked words that depict sensory imagery’ (Dingemanse 2012) are frequently found in the languages of all regions of the world, but their distribution, use and functioning across languages of the Caucasus has never been documented from a regional perspective. This talk will give you a brief taste of the various kinds of expressive language present in the three autochthonous Caucasian families: Abkhaz-Adyghean, Kartvelian and Nakh-Daghestanian. It will also look at greater length at the specific morphological and syntactic peculiarities of expressives in Georgian, which exhibit exuberant consonant clusters, processes of reduplication uncharacteristic of the language as a whole, as well as specific morphosyntactic alignment splits between different classes of expressive.
APRIL 7, 2025
Elin McCready (ICREA/Autonomous University of Barcelona) and Christopher Davis (University of the Ryukyus)
"The Invocational Impact of Slurs"
ABSTRACT:
Rappaport (2019) articulates three distinct components that together constitute the meaning profile of slur terms: 1. descriptive: Slurs denote particular groups of people; 2. evaluative: Slurs communicate or signal the speaker’s negative attitudes towards the group so denoted; 3. affective: Slurs are capable of“expressing powerful emotions and causing a strong emotional response in hearers”. We build on this three-component model of slur meanings, arguing that the slur’s descriptive content is encoded in its at-issue semantic denotation. The evaluative component has received the bulk of attention in both the linguistic and philosophical literature. It is this component that drives the intuition that use of a slur term signals some kind of negative sentiment on the part of the speaker toward the group picked out by the term. We argue for a non-conventionalist account of this meaning component, in which the evaluative component is derived through a particular kind of inference, as argued by Nunberg (2018), Pullum (2018), and Rappaport (2019). We argue further that the mechanism underlying this inference is of a kind with (at least some instances of) indexical meaning as articulated in third-wave sociolinguistics (Eckert, 2008, 2018). Our primary aim in this talk is to better understand Rappaport’s affective component, and to get clarity about how this component relates to the other two. In Rappaport’s formulation, this component includes (i) the expression of powerful emotions, and (ii) the elicitation of powerful emotions. It is the second subcomponent we focus attention on here: how do slur terms come by their ability to cause distress to those who perceive them? We concur with Rappaport’s view that the impact of a slur term cannot be fully derived from its evaluative component, contra e.g. Nunberg (2018) and Pullum (2018). We will argue instead that a slur’s impact derives from what we term invocational meaning, whose characteristic property is to unilaterally alter the discourse context by bringing to contextual and cognitive prominence a pre-existing but possibly backgrounded complex, achieved by mere mention (or more strictly speaking, mere perception) of the invoking term itself. Time permitting, we will discuss extensions of this model to non-slur terms as well.
MAY 26, 2025
Donna Jo Napoli (Swarthmore College)
"Creativity in Taboo Terms in Sign Languages"
ABSTRACT:
Deaf signing communities share many of the same language taboos that hearing speakers observe. Still, there are areas that are sticky in sign that are not in speech and vice versa. We will take a peek at how signers create taboo signs, looking at ASL and DGS (the sign language of Germany) and perhaps a couple of other languages, noting primarily morphological creativity but also syntactic creativity.
JUNE 9, 2025
Gerhard Van Huyssteen (North-West University)
"Taboo Language and Language Change: Current Knowledge"
ABSTRACT:
That words and their meanings are naturally unstable and subject to change, is a well-established and largely undisputed fact in modern-day linguistics. However, despite “… the volatile nature of the vocabulary surrounding taboos …” (Burridge and Benczes 2019, 183) being a glaringly obvious study object for historical linguistics, “… it has been only relatively recently that the effects of taboo on language development have made an appearance in the mainstream linguistics literature … [Until recently], [d]iscussions of taboo, even within historical linguistic textbooks, focused on remote examples involving ancient naming rituals and taboos on dangerous animals.” (Burridge and Benczes 2019, 198). This sentiment is echoed by several other scholars, among them Burridge (2012, 88) (who refers to it as “a striking example of scholarly squeamishness”), Van der Sijs (2002, 524-526), and Zenner, Ruette, and Devriendt (2017, 107). It is especially in language contact situations where the interaction of general language and taboo language is easily noticeable: swearwords are borrowed generously between languages in language contact situations. For example, Van der Sijs (2002, 524-526) shows that roundabout half of the 45 Dutch maledicta that she studied, were loanwords or derivations of such loans. The general explanation for this phenomenon is that loan maledicta make the expression of negative emotions and attitudes more acceptable for conversational participants (Van Sterkenburg 2001, 77), since swearing in one’s first language is “perceived to have a stronger emotional resonance” (Dewaele 2012, 595). In this presentation, the central research question will be: Given our existing knowledge base of language change, and more specifically lexical semantic change, what do we currently know about the change of taboo words and constructions? We will firstly aim to give a succinct but comprehensive overview of existing literature on taboo language and language change, drawing on the handful of publications on this topic, among others Allan (2001), Allan and Burridge (1991, 2006), Andersen (2014), Beelen and Van der Sijs (2022), Borkowska and Kleparski (2007), Burridge (2006), Burridge and Benczes (2019), McWhorter (2021), Traugott (2010, 2017), López-Couso (2010), Van der Sijs (2002, 2007), and Zenner, Ruette, and Devriendt (2017). From the literature, some existing theses will be defined and illustrated with examples from Dutch, English, and Afrikaans, and their respectives language contact situations. Secondly, we will present a case study as testing grounds for the general (hypo)theses about taboo language and language change, viz. on Dutch as donor language. We will show patterns of Dutch taboo loanwords in languages across the globe, but specifically also in languages spoken in former colonies of the Netherlands. This analysis will be based on a dataset extracted from Van der Sijs’ Nederlandse woorden wereldwijd [Dutch words worldwide] (NWWW 2010).