36.3747, FYI: STAL Seminar: Xavier Villalba, "Expressivity Cross-Linguistically: A Corpus Study of Expressive and Evaluative Adjectives in Romance and Germanic"

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3747. Fri Dec 05 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3747, FYI: STAL Seminar: Xavier Villalba, "Expressivity Cross-Linguistically: A Corpus Study of Expressive and Evaluative Adjectives in Romance and Germanic"

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Date: 04-Dec-2025
From: Dan Zeman [danczeman at gmail.com]
Subject: STAL Seminar: Xavier Villalba, "Expressivity Cross-Linguistically: A Corpus Study of Expressive and Evaluative Adjectives in Romance and Germanic"


The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network
(https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home), an international and
interdisciplinary network whose primary aim is to promote work on
slurs, pejoratives, expressives and evaluative terms from less studied
languages, invites you to the third talk of the 2025-2026 academic
year. The invited speaker is Xavier Villalba (Autonomous University of
Barcelona), who will give a talk entitled "Expressivity
cross-linguistically: A corpus study of expressive and evaluative
adjectives in Romance and Germanic" (see the abstract below). The
event will take place online on Monday, DECEMBER 15, 14:30-16:00
Central European Time (CET), and is part of the of STAL network
seminar series (program here:
https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to
participate, please write to stalnetwork at gmail.com for the Zoom link.
Below you can find the abstract of the talk.
All welcome!
ABSTRACT:
In this presentation, I argue that pure expressive adjectives (such as
English fucking and damn) represent the final stage in a process of
intersubjectivization (Traugott 2010; Traugott & Dasher 2002). This
process begins with a descriptive qualifying adjective, moves through
a stage of subjectivization—typical of both evaluative adjectives
(e.g., pathetic, horrible) and mixed expressive adjectives (bloody,
shitty)—and culminates in the pure expressives.
This pragmatic shift is linked to semantic bleaching as well as
syntactic changes traceable in our corpora. These changes involve
features like gradation, function (modifier vs. predicative), and
position (postnominal vs. prenominal modification).
To support this claim, I will present two corpus studies:
1. A synchronic study designed to identify the most useful features
for distinguishing each adjective class in Germanic and Romance
languages.
2. A diachronic study, focused on English and Catalan, to trace the
historical emergence of these features.
The results of these studies will provide a more accurate and
comprehensive cross-linguistic understanding of expressive adjectives.
Furthermore, they will offer insights into the patterns of change
involved and how the speed of this evolution varies across different
items and languages.

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Philosophy of Language
                     Semantics
                     Syntax




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