STAL organizes a monthly seminar on issues related to the study of slurs, pejoratives, and evaluative and expressive terms in general, from less studied languages.
The titles and abstracts of the talks in the 2025-2026 academic year can be seen here.
The titles and abstracts of the talks in the 2024-2025 academic year can be seen here.
The titles and abstracts of the talks in the 2023-2024 academic year can be seen here.
In the 2026-2027 academic year, the STAL seminar takes place on
MONDAYS, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time.
The next seminar is on
OCTOBER 12, 2026
Martina Wiltschko (ICREA/Pompeu Fabra University)
"The Sounds of Affect"
ABSTRACT:
The empirical goal of this talk is to explore the use of a set of emotive expressions in Spanish, namely ah, ay, oh, oy, uh, and uy. These expressions have been previously described as indicating both unexpectedness of an event (ah, oh, uh) as well as a subjective evaluation of the unexpected event (ay, oy, uy; Montes 1999). Thus, these forms encode both epistemic and affective content, a defining property of emotive markers cross-linguistically. My analytical goal is to present an analysis of the form, function and distribution of these markers. I argue that they belong to a set of categories that belong to the grammar of interaction (Wiltschko 2021). Specifically, I analyze them as speaker oriented pro-forms which indicate the note-worthiness of the event, object, or utterance that triggered the utterance (Wiltschko 2024). This accounts for their epistemic content. As for their affective content, I propose that it derives from the vowel-quality and hence is best analysed as an articulatory gesture with ideophonic meaning (Thompson & Do 2019). Specifically, ah, oh, uh are associated with increasing noteworthiness (ah being neutral and uh being highest on the note-worthiness scale, Montes 1999). This increase in noteworthiness is mirrored by the increase in effort in producing these vowels, both in terms of tongue position and lip rounding. As for the subjective evaluation, I argue that it, too, is ideophonically expressed through the glide, which is produced by an inward movement of the articulators which in turn mirrors the inward character of a subjective evaluation.
The schedule for the entire year is the following:
OCTOBER 12, 2026
Martina Wiltschko (ICREA/Pompeu Fabra University)
"The Sounds of Affect"
NOVEMBER 2026
Daniel James (Technical University Berlin)
TBA.
DECEMBER 14, 2026
Jennifer Saul (University of Waterloo)
TBA.
JANUARY 2027
TBA.
TBA.
FEBRUARY 2027
Chris Cousens (University of Glasgow)
TBA.
MARCH 2027
Jessica Keiser (University of North Carolina)
TBA.
APRIL 19, 2027
Cornelia Loos (University of Cologne)
TBA.
MAY 2027
Marcin Lewiński (NOVA University of Lisbon)
TBA.
JUNE 2027
TBA.
TBA.