OCTOBER 27, 2025

Luvell Anderson (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

"Theories of Reclamation"

ABSTRACT:

Slurs are a complex linguistic phenomenon that requires attention to both linguistic and non-linguistic features for their understanding. One aspect of slurring language that highlights this attention is reclamation. Linguistic reclamation—at least, the version philosophers tend to speak about—refers to the practice of reappropriating slurs for non-derogatory purposes. It is pretty common for members of an oppressed group to reclaim slurs as an act of resistance. Some have attempted to provide theories that account for this phenomenon in general terms. In this talk, I argue that socio-historically specific accounts, rather than general ones, provide more accurate analyses of reclamation.

NOVEMBER 17, 2025

Claire Horisk (University of Missouri)

"Derogatory Speech: Conversations, Hearers, and Listeners"

ABSTRACT:

In discussions of how to mitigate political and cultural polarization, we are often told that we should listen to our opponents. But should we listen regardless of what they say—even to derogatory speech? From the standpoint of philosophy, the prescription to listen lacks subtlety, and we cannot reach greater subtlety without a philosophical account of listening itself. In my recent work, I distinguish between listening and hearing and argue that listening to derogatory speech in the context of a conversation is sometimes morally wrong. In this talk, I expand my account, particularly with respect to how power dynamics affect who counts as a conversational participant.

DECEMBER 15, 2025

Xavier Villalba (Autonomous University of Barcelona)

"Expressivity Cross-linguistically: A Corpus Study of Expressive and Evaluative Adjectives in Romance and Germanic"

ABSTRACT:

In this presentation, I argue that pure expressive adjectives (such as English fucking and damn) represent the final stage in a process of intersubjectivization (Traugott 2010; Traugott & Dasher 2002). This process begins with a descriptive qualifying adjective, moves through a stage of subjectivization—typical of both evaluative adjectives (e.g., pathetic, horrible) and mixed expressive adjectives (bloody, shitty)—and culminates in the pure expressives. This pragmatic shift is linked to semantic bleaching as well as syntactic changes traceable in our corpora. These changes involve features like gradation, function (modifier vs. predicative), and position (postnominal vs. prenominal modification).To support this claim, I will present two corpus studies: 1. A synchronic study designed to identify the most useful features for distinguishing each adjective class in Germanic and Romance languages; 2.A diachronic study, focused on English and Catalan, to trace the historical emergence of these features. The results of these studies will provide a more accurate and comprehensive cross-linguistic understanding of expressive adjectives. Furthermore, they will offer insights into the patterns of change involved and how the speed of this evolution varies across different items and languages.

JANUARY 19, 2026

Daisy Dixon (Cardiff University)

"Aesthetic Slurs"

ABSTRACT:

I present a novel account of what I call the ‘aesthetic slur’. Inspired by Patricia Hill Collins’s notion of ‘controlling images’, I delineate images which behave in much the same way as linguistic slurs, analysing particularly their feature of ‘effluence’; how their harmful content can leak out and not be insulated by intention or context. I then use this analysis to explain what went wrong with Makode Linde's controversial artwork Painful Cake (2012).

FEBRUARY 9, 2026

Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers University)

"Why Do Mantras Move Us?"

ABSTRACT:

Why do mantras like 'What Would Jesus Do?', ‘Boys will be boys’, and ‘It is what it is’ bear repeating?  Orthodox analyses don’t suffice: not only are such mantras overtly trivial; they don’t appear to indirectly implicate substantive information, emotional affect, or social affiliation. I propose that they function as frames, by encapsulating regulative principles for interpreting their topics in an open-ended, intuitive way. Frames’ schematic evocativeness makes them useful tools for coordinating interpretation and action across variations in assumptions, attitudes, and applications.  But at the same time, their intuitive, amorphous flexibility can also make them insidious devices for coercing and seducing resistant audiences. Explaining the interpretive power of framing devices requires expanding the orthodox explanatory toolkit beyond standard propositional attitudes like belief, to encompass perspectives.

MARCH 9, 2026

Leopold Hess (Jagiellonian University)

"Recognizing Slurs: The Case of Polish Murzyn"

ABSTRACT:

The purpose of this talk is to present and analyze an interesting case of a word becoming socially recognized as a slur. The case is that of the Polish word Murzyn, referring to people of dark skin or African descent. It has been in use for centuries, but never been explicitly deemed offensive or problematic until relatively recently. A few years ago it became a subject of a wide-ranging and heated public debate, the result of which was an entirely new almost-consensus among experts and public actors that it should be in fact considered offensive and its use should no longer be considered acceptable – even though many Polish speakers appear to use it as a generally neutral term, without any offensive or derogatory intentions. There are some important lessons to be drawn from this case for meaning-theories of slurs, but there are also puzzling questions regarding the general relevance of such theories.

APRIL 20, 2026

Robin Jeshion (University of Southern California)

"What Is Wrong with Slurs?"

ABSTRACT:

Many forms of verbal discourse are dangerous and cause harm, yet slurs are repeatedly distinguished for special moral censure, so much so that in many liberal democracies, their use is not legally protected. What is wrong with using them? In this paper, I aim to illuminate why slurs are rightly singled out for special, deeper social censure. Such acts do typically perform wrongs and cause numerous harms: they negatively stereotypes, reductively de-individualize, create and perpetuate social hierarchies and social exclusion, and undermine the target group’s reputation, as many researchers have shown. Nevertheless, I believe none of these captures the distinctive moral wrong in slurring speech acts. To illuminate their moral dimension, I take inspiration from moral-psychological work on degradation, humiliation, and dehumanization, as well as work on the distinctive wrong in interrogational torture. Sussman, Luban, and Kramer have argued that what is distinctively wrong with interrogational torture is not the extreme pain itself – though of course it is wrong for that. What makes torture distinctively wrong is it being used as a tool to humiliate by forcing the victim via their affective experience to, effectively, collude with the torturer, and do so against their will. To torture, the torturer ensures that the victim experiences their own agency as undermined, as ‘owned’ by the torturer. Building on these ideas, I argue that a prime source of the perniciousness in weapon uses of slurs that distinguishes them from other harmful types of speech parallels a deep wrong inherent to torture: the perversion and undermining of the slur’s target’s agency by forcing them to perceive and experience themselves as lesser humans. Weapon uses of slurs in the conditions of most vulnerability are best seen as micro-linguistic acts of torture. I close this paper by addressing the moral dimension of slur-mentions. I argue that there is a foundational moral wrong in slur-mentions, one that is parasitic on the moral wrong in using slurs. Slurs, the words themselves, function as representations of the perversion and undermining of their target group’s agency, akin to the way photographic representations of torture (and lynching and rape) function. In non-legal or non-education contexts, they can be abused, with the representations serving as additional symbolic humiliations and affronts to the human dignity of the target groups.

MAY 18, 2026

Yim Binh Felix Sze (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

"Taboos and Euphemisms in Sex-Related Signs in Asian Sign Languages"

ABSTRACT:

This talk presents findings from my earlier paper on sex-related euphemisms in four historically unrelated Asian sign languages: Hong Kong Sign Language, Jakarta Sign Language, Sri Lankan Sign Language, and Japanese Sign Language. The central research question is whether direct visual reference to sex-related body parts or concepts is taboo among Deaf signers, and, if so, what strategies they use to form euphemistic expressions. I will present evidence showing that, although Deaf signers are accustomed to the visual explicitness of the signing modality, the highly iconic nature of some sex-related signs can still be offensive, thus giving rise to euphemistic expressions. While some of these euphemistic strategies aim to reduce the visual iconicity associated with taboo signs, most closely resemble strategies used in spoken languages, suggesting that verbal politeness strategies may be universal across language modalities.

JUNE 1, 2026

Mingya Liu (Humboldt University of Berlin)

"Expressive Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese"

ABSTRACT:

In this talk, I will present two case studies of expressive language in Mandarin Chinese, both of which involve classifiers. In one case, classifiers such as "wei" and "zun" express honorification towards the token or kind denotation of the head noun. In the other case, expressive vocatives in Mandarin Chinese, contain the second person pronoun and the generic classifier "ge" and they express antihonorifiation towards the addressee. I will present a uniform multidimensional account of both phenomena, where the difference lies in whether the semantic composition relies on a type-shift operation or not.