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
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.
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)
"What Is Wrong with Slurs?"
MAY 18, 2026
Yim Binh Felix Sze (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
"Taboos and Euphemisms in Sex-Related Signs in Asian Sign Languages"
JUNE 1, 2026
Mingya Liu (Humboldt University of Berlin)
"Expressive Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese"