35.3346, Calls: New – experimental – perspectives on valence in language (Workshop)

Tue Nov 26 06:05:02 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-3346. Tue Nov 26 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.3346, Calls: New – experimental – perspectives on valence in language (Workshop)

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Date: 24-Nov-2024
From: Anouch BOURMAYAN [anouch.bourmayan at sorbonne-universite.fr]
Subject: New – experimental – perspectives on valence in language (Workshop)

Full Title: New – experimental – perspectives on valence in language
(Workshop)

Date: 13-Jun-2025 - 13-Jun-2025
Location: Sorbonne Université, Paris, France
Contact Person: Anouch Bourmayan
Meeting Email: anouch.bourmayan at sorbonne-universite.fr

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Philosophy of Language;
Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics

Call Deadline: 28-Feb-2025

Meeting Description:

It is widely agreed that Frege’s On Sense and Reference set the
foundations for contemporary philosophy of language, as well as formal
semantics. It should not come as a surprise, then, that affective
meaning, which tracks speakers’ subjective feelings and attitudes, has
been almost completely dismissed in both disciplines as an unsuitable
object of study. Indeed, Frege’s misgivings about the relevance of
psychological aspects is one of the hallmarks of his approach to logic
and formal language. A way of rephrasing Frege’s worries would be to
say that the affective information associated with a word is
necessarily subjective, and, as such, irrelevant to the study of
meaning that aims at objective and hence shareable aspects of meaning.
This view has remained largely unchallenged, and the dismissal of the
relevance of affective information sank even deeper down as this
referentialist semantics approach to natural language reified in the
mid 20th century with the melding of technical and philosophical
advances from Tarski, Davidson, Montague, and Lewis, and then
standardized with the formalism in Heim and Kratzer (1998).

However, the last 20 years have seen a flourishing of interest in such
phenomena, including recent proposals by, e.g. McCready 2020 on
expressives, Cepollaro 2020 or Hess 2021 on slurs, and Jeshion 2021
for a taxonomy of pejorative meaning. Nonetheless, the mainstream
still views these phenomena as generally irrelevant to the study of
meaning proper, in part since they are thought to manifest in a
minimal or exceptional part of the lexicon.

In parallel, the field of cognitive psychology has extensively
explored the significance of valence in language. Following an early
idea from Wundt (1907), Zajonc (1980, 2000) has defended the general
hypothesis that affective responses may precede conceptual
recognition, that is, may be evoked with minimal stimulus input and
virtually no cognitive processing. Regarding language more
specifically, as early as 1957 Osgood introduced the semantic
differential technique which allowed him to define the affective
connotation of words – not only specific classes of words but “plain
vanilla” words – along three underlying dimensions, the first of which
was valence. Other models of semantic differentials were subsequently
developed, including those by Mehrabian and Russell (1974), Bradley
and Lang (1999) and Warriner et al. (2013). Overall, all the studies
confirmed that valence is the most significant dimension of the three
parameters, being the most stable and the most informative one.
Further, with advances in psycho- and neurolinguistic methodologies in
the last decades, the Affective Primacy hypothesis found support at
the level of linguistic content, comparing affective to descriptive
dimensions of meaning (see, among others, Bargh et al. 1989, Kousta et
al. 2009, Gaillard et al. 2006 or Ponz et al. 2014).

In this workshop, we would like to examine the idea that valence has a
greater role in language than has been generally acknowledged. Indeed,
a word’s valence might be an important aspect of the meaning of many
more words than those that are recognized as “expressives”. That is,
expressivity could be a broad and ubiquitous phenomenon rather than a
feature specific to only certain terms.
Experimental approaches are welcome, but not mandatory.

Invited speakers:
Diana Mazzarella (Université de Neuchâtel)
Joshua Knobe (Yale University)
Nicole Gotzner (Osnabrück University)

Organizing committee:
Anouch Bourmayan (Sorbonne Université)
Pascal Ludwig (Sorbonne Université)
Morgan Moyer (Sorbonne Université) 

Scientific committee:
Anouch Bourmayan (Sorbonne Université)
Pascal Ludwig (Sorbonne Université)
Morgan Moyer (Sorbonne Université) 
Isidora Stojanovic (Institut Jean Nicod)
Brent Strickland (Institut Jean Nicod)

Call for Papers:

Submission guidelines:
We invite submission of abstracts for 40-minute talks. Abstracts
should be anonymous. The main text should be no more than two pages
long, with an optional third page for figures. Abstracts are due
before February 28, 2025, and should be sent to Anouch Bourmayan at
the following address: anouch.bourmayan at sorbonne-universite.fr.

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