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 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 2025-2026 academic year, the STAL seminar takes place on
MONDAYS, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time.
The next seminar is
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.
The schedule for the 2025-2026 academic year is the following:
OCTOBER 27, 2025
Luvell Anderson (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
"Theories of Reclamation"
NOVEMBER 17, 2025
Claire Horisk (University of Missouri)
"Derogatory Speech: Conversations, Hearers, and Listeners"
DECEMBER 15, 2025
Xavier Villalba (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
"Expressivity Cross-linguistically: A Corpus Study of Expressive and Evaluative Adjectives in Romance and Germanic"
JANUARY 19, 2026
Daisy Dixon (Cardiff University)
"Aesthetic Slurs"
FEBRUARY 9, 2026
Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers University)
"Why Do Mantras Move Us?"
MARCH 9, 2026
Leopold Hess (Jagiellonian University)
"Recognizing Slurs: The Case of Polish Murzyn"
APRIL 20, 2026
Robin Jeshion (University of Southern California)
TBA
MAY, 2026
Yim Binh Felix Sze (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
TBA
JUNE, 2026
Mingya Liu (Humboldt University of Berlin)
TBA