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 last year's meetings can be seen here.

In the 2024-2025 academic year, the seminar will be on MONDAYS, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time (CET).

To participate, send an email to stalnetwork@gmail.com for the Zoom link.

The next seminar is on

DECEMBER 9, 2024

Elin McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University) 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.

Here is the schedule for the current academic year:

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"

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Matteo Colombo and Giovanni Cassani (Tilburg University)

"In the Thick of It. Do Thick Terms Constitute a Distinctive Class of Affectively-charged Language?"

NOVEMBER 4, 2024

Nicolás Lo Guercio (CONICET/University of Buenos Aires)

"Maximize Expressivity!"

DECEMBER 9, 2024

Elin McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University) and Christopher Davis (University of the Ryukyus)

"The Invocational Impact of Slurs"

JANUARY 20, 2025

Kristen Syrett (Rutgers University)

"How Language Supports the Acquisition of Predicates of Mental States and Emotions"

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

Thomas Wier (Free University of Tbilisi)

TBA

MARCH 2025

Claire Horisk (University of Missouri)

TBA

APRIL 2025

TBA

JUNE 2025

Mingya Liu (Humboldt University Berlin)

TBA