36.3266, FYI: Polysemy in the Evaluative Sphere Seminar: Michelle Liu, "Ad Hoc Concepts, Polysemy, and Verbal Disputes"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3266. Mon Oct 27 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3266, FYI: Polysemy in the Evaluative Sphere Seminar: Michelle Liu, "Ad Hoc Concepts, Polysemy, and Verbal Disputes"

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Mara Baccaro, Daniel Swanson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Daniel Swanson <daniel at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 27-Oct-2025
From: Dan Zeman [danczeman at gmail.com]
Subject: Polysemy in the Evaluative Sphere Seminar: Michelle Liu, "Ad Hoc Concepts, Polysemy, and Verbal Disputes"


Polysemy in the Evalutive Sphere is a seminar pertaining to the
project Slurs and the Lexicon: A Rich-Lexicon Approach to Slurs and
Other Evaluative Expressions - LEXISLUR
(https://danzeman.weebly.com/lexislur.html) featuring monthly talks by
specialists in polysemy. We cordially invite you to the first talk of
the seminar series, to be given by Michelle Liu (Monash University)
and entitled "Ad Hoc Concepts, Polysemy, and Verbal Disputes" (see the
abstract below). The event takes place online on Friday, 31 October
2025, 11.00-12.30 Western European Time (WET). Please write to
danczeman at gmail.com for the Zoom link.
All welcome!
ABSTRACT:
A speaker often uses a word to communicate what linguists call an "ad
hoc concept", an occasion-specific meaning that is different from the
word’s stable, encoded meaning, and the hearer can usually construct
the intended ad hoc concept through pragmatic inference (e.g. Carston
2002). It is sometimes suggested that certain forms of polysemy find
their origins in ad hoc concepts. In this talk, I will explore the
relationship between ad hoc concepts and polysemy. I will also
consider how these two related phenomena can provide a framework for
theorising the cognitive-linguistic mechanisms underpinning verbal
disputes. As an example, I will focus on verbal disputes about racism,
drawing on recent work by Liao and Hansen (2023) on the semantics of
"racist".

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Philosophy of Language
                     Pragmatics
                     Semantics




------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List, a U.S. 501(c)(3) not for profit organization:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Brill https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Peter Lang AG http://www.peterlang.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3266
----------------------------------------------------------