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
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.
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)
TBA
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