37.3629, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027: What a Situation! Cross-Categorial and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Evaluation (Italy)

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Subject: 37.3629, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027: What a Situation! Cross-Categorial and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Evaluation (Italy)

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Date: 03-Nov-2026
From: Luisa Brucale; Luisa Corona; Nicola Grandi; Egle Mocciaro [luisa.brucale at unipa.it]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2027: What a Situation! Cross-Categorial and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Evaluation


Workshop at SLE 2027: What a Situation! Cross-Categorial and
Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Evaluation
Short Title: WS SLE 2027

Date: 25-Aug-2027 - 28-Aug-2027
Location: Košice, Italy
Contact: Luisa Brucale, Luisa Corona, Egle Mocciaro
Contact Email: luisa.brucale at unipa.it

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Morphology; Pragmatics;
Semantics; Typology

Submission Deadline: 15-Nov-2026

What a situation! Cross-categorial and cross-linguistic perspectives
on evaluation
Proposed workshop at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2027)
Košice, Slovakia, 25–28 August 2027
Convenors:
Luisa Brucale, University of Palermo
Luisa Corona, University of L’Aquila
Nicola Grandi, University of Bologna
Egle Mocciaro, Masaryk University
Call for Preliminary Abstracts
Keywords: evaluation; evaluative morphology; situation structure;
constructional meaning; evaluative situations.
Topic and Research Questions:
Situations are not only located in time and structured in terms of
aspect, participants and internal phases. They may also be assessed
with respect to contextually salient standards and expectations, and
thereby construed as more or less prototypical, intense, extensive,
successful, accurate, appropriate or valuable. We refer to this
operation as evaluation of situation. Following Lyons (1977: 483), we
use situation as an umbrella term encompassing states, events,
processes and actions, thus covering both static and dynamic
situations. Rather than being tied to a single semantic dimension,
situation evaluation (henceforth SE) encompasses a family of meanings
through which speakers assess situations along quantitative and
qualitative parameters. Languages encode such evaluations through a
wide range of lexical, morphological and constructional resources that
are by no means restricted to the verbal domain. A situation may be
evaluated by means of a derived verb, an action or event noun, a
light-verb construction, a periphrasis, or a combination of these
strategies.
Building on research on evaluative morphology, including the SLE 2011
workshop devoted to this topic, the proposed workshop brings together
strands of inquiry into aspect, actionality, pluractionality, event
nominalization, degree modification and constructional semantics.
Studies of verbal diminutives have already established the
cross-linguistic relevance and semantic diversity of situation-related
evaluation (Audring, Leufkens & van Lier 2021). What remains less
systematically explored is how evaluative meanings compare across
lexical categories and construction types, and whether formally
different strategies evaluate situations in comparable ways. The
workshop addresses this gap by examining actions, processes and states
from an explicitly cross-categorial and cross-linguistic perspective.
In the functional sense adopted here, evaluation characterizes an
object, property or event relative to an expected, canonical or
contextually salient standard associated with a given category (Grandi
2002; Prieto 2015; Grandi & Körtvélyessy 2015). This may involve
deviation from a standard, but also proximity to a category prototype
or conformity to an expected realization (Masini 2026). When applied
to events, evaluation may operate along dimensions which are not
inherently evaluative, such as duration, frequency or completeness.
These dimensions acquire an evaluative interpretation when they serve
to assess an occurrence relative to an expected or contextually
salient realization of the event category. Evaluation is thus
distinguished from description by its dependence on a
category-internal standard: una passeggiata di venti minuti ‘a 20
minute walk’ specifies duration in absolute terms, whereas una
passeggiatina ‘a walk:DIM’ construes the event as brief relative to
what is expected of a walk. An event may thus be construed as
attenuated or intensified, brief or protracted, continuous or
fragmented, carefully or poorly executed, fully successful or only
attempted. Event evaluation may also concern the appropriateness or
value of the event, or the speaker’s axiological stance towards the
occurrence as a whole. Restricting event evaluation to diminution and
augmentation obscures a much wider range of meanings and linguistic
strategies through which speakers assess events relative to
quantitative, qualitative and normative standards.
Evaluative verbs provide one well-established point of access to this
domain. Forms such as Italian dormicchiare ‘to sleep a little, badly,
in a non-continuous way’ or scribacchiare ‘to write a little; to
scribble; to scrawl; to jot down’ do not merely reduce or increase the
quantity of an action. They may modify the temporal and mereological
structure of the event, its degree of intensity, the continuity of its
development, the agent’s commitment, and the manner or accuracy of its
realization. The resulting interpretations depend on the interaction
between the evaluative marker and the actional properties of the base,
particularly dynamicity, duration and telicity(Grandi 2005; Tovena &
Kihm 2008; Tovena 2011, 2015; Amiot & Stosic 2014; Audring, Leufkens &
van Lier 2021; Brucale, Corona & Mocciaro 2026).
The same event can, however, be accessed through a noun. Action and
event nouns preserve, to different degrees, the event structure and
argumental properties of their verbal bases, while also imposing their
own conditions of individuation and quantification. Italian formations
such as dormitina (< dormita ‘a sleep’), passeggiatina (< passeggiata
‘a walk’), and telefonatina (< telefonata ‘a phone call’) may construe
an occurrence as brief, limited in extension, occasional, approximate
or relatively undemanding. In light-verb constructions such as dare
una letta ‘to have a quick read; to skim through’ and fare una
passeggiatina ‘to go for a little/nice walk’, evaluation cannot
necessarily be attributed to a single lexical item: the event
construal results from the interaction among the support verb, the
event noun, determiners, evaluative morphology and contextual
modifiers. Comparable questions arise with periphrastic expressions
such as English take a quick look or read a little, whose
interpretation may range from a temporal or quantitative specification
to a characterization of the event as cursory, limited or undemanding.
Such cases help identify the boundary between event description and
event evaluation.
A cross-categorial perspective also raises crucial questions of
semantic scope and compositionality. With event nominals, evaluation
may interact with the systematic polysemy between eventive,
resultative and participant-related readings; with nouns denoting
communicative events, it may also affect the illocutionary and
interpersonal force of the utterance. Conversely, event evaluation may
emerge at constructional level even when none of the individual
components is independently evaluative. The relevant meaning may be
conventionally encoded, compositionally derived or pragmatically
inferred. Comparisons across categories can help establish diagnostics
for these alternatives and determine whether similar interpretations
reflect shared mechanisms or distinct processes.
The workshop adopts an explicitly cross-linguistic perspective.
Languages differ not only in the formal resources through which event
evaluation is encoded, but also in the dimensions made available by
particular categories and constructions. A comparative approach can
determine whether recurrent associations exist between specific
evaluative meanings and verbs, event nouns, light-verb constructions,
reduplicative patterns or periphrases. The same question extends to
non-verbal modifiers such as particles, adjectives and adverbs. Such
patterns are observable in Mandarin verbal reduplication (kàn-kan
‘take a look’; Arcodia, Basciano & Melloni 2015), German -eln verbs
(hüsteln ‘cough slightly’) (Audring et al. 2017; Weidhaas & Schmid
2015) and the Slavic delimitative prefix po- (Russian po-spat’ ‘sleep
for a while’) (Dickey & Hutcheson 2003) all construe events as
attenuated, brief or tentative, yet differ in category, productivity
and degree of grammaticalization, and thus test the boundary between
evaluation and aspect. Particular attention will be paid to strategies
in which attenuation interacts with repetition, intensity or event
delimitation, and to evidence from typologically diverse languages.
Rather than presupposing a unified category, the workshop seeks to
establish which phenomena can be compared within a common functional
framework and where distinctions must be maintained.
The workshop invites contributions addressing questions such as the
following:
1)      How can SE be identified and delimited? Which diagnostics
distinguish it from, or establish its interaction with, aspect,
actionality, pluractionality, degree, manner and quantification?
2)      Which dimensions of situations can be evaluated across
languages, and how do quantitative dimensions such as duration,
frequency and intensity interact with qualitative dimensions such as
accuracy, success, appropriateness and value?
3)      How is SE distributed across verbs, action and event nouns,
light-verb constructions, periphrases, reduplicative patterns,
particles, adjectives and adverbs? Which recurrent mappings between
meanings and formal strategies emerge?
4)      How do telicity, agentivity and argument structure constrain
the interpretation of evaluative forms and constructions? How can
conventionally encoded meanings be distinguished from compositional
effects and pragmatic inferences?
5)      What determines the semantic scope of evaluation? Does it
target the situation as a whole, its internal phases, its manner of
realization, its result, one of its participants or the proposition in
which it is embedded?
6)      Which recurrent mappings between evaluative meanings and
formal strategies emerge cross-linguistically, and which are
language-specific, construction-specific or dependent on discourse
context?
7)      How do SE meanings arise diachronically, become
conventionalized or lexicalized, and develop from meanings associated
with quantity, aspect, repetition, degree or manner?
8)      How are SE meanings acquired in first and second language
acquisition, and how does the ability to interpret and use evaluative
expressions develop?
Contributions may be synchronic, diachronic or typological and may
draw on corpus data, fieldwork, experimental evidence, grammatical
descriptions or comparative databases.
Selected References:
Amiot, Dany & Dejan Stosic. 2014. When evaluative morphology,
pluractionality and aspect get tangled up: A case study of French
suffixed verbs. In Zoe Gavriilidou & Anthi Revithiadou (eds.),
Mélanges offerts à Anna Anastassiades-Syméonides, 16-33. Kavala:
Saita.
Arcodia, Giorgio Francesco, Bianca Basciano & Chiara Melloni. 2015.
Areal perspectives on total reduplication of verbs in Sinitic. Studies
in Language 39(4). 836-872.
Audring, Jenny, Sterre Leufkens & Eva van Lier. 2021. Small events:
Verbal diminutives in the languages of the world. Linguistic Typology
at the Crossroads 1(1). 223-256.
Audring, Jenny, Geert Booij & Ray Jackendoff. 2017. Menscheln,
kibbelen, sparkle: Verbal diminutives between grammar and lexicon.
Linguistics in the Netherlands 34. 1–15. DOI: 10.1075/avt.34.01aud.
Brucale, Luisa, Luisa Corona & Egle Mocciaro. 2026. Where evaluation
meets manner: The case of Italian deverbal evaluative verbs. Lingue e
linguaggio 25(1). 93-128.
Dickey, Stephen M., & Julie Hutcheson. (2003). Delimitative verbs in
Russian, Czech and Slavic. In Robert A. Maguire & Alan Timberlake (A
cura di), American Contributions to the 13th International Congress of
Slavists, Ljubljana, August 2003. Vol. 1: Linguistics (pp. 23–36).
Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi. 1994.
Morphopragmatics: Diminutives and intensifiers in Italian, German, and
other languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Grandi, Nicola. 2002. Morfologie in contatto: Le costruzioni
valutative nelle lingue del Mediterraneo. Milano: FrancoAngeli.
Grandi, Nicola. 2005. I verbi deverbali suffissati in italiano: dai
dizionari al Web. Cesena - Roma: Caissa Italia.
Grandi, Nicola & Lívia Körtvélyessy. 2015. Introduction: Why
evaluative morphology? In Nicola Grandi & Lívia Körtvélyessy (eds.),
The Edinburgh handbook of evaluative morphology, 3-20. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Körtvélyessy, Lívia & Pavol Štekauer (convenors). 2011. Evaluative
morphology. Workshop at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europaea, Logroño, 8-11 September 2011.
Masini, Francesca. 2026. When evaluation is not deviation: A closer
look at prototypicality as an evaluative function. Lingue e linguaggio
25(1). 215–249.
Prieto, Victor M. 2015. The semantics of evaluative morphology. In
Nicola Grandi & Lívia Körtvélyessy (eds.), The Edinburgh handbook of
evaluative morphology, 21-31. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Tovena, Lucia M. 2011. When small is many in the event domain. Lexis
6. 41-58.
Tovena, Lucia M. 2015. Evaluative morphology and aspect/actionality.
In Nicola Grandi & Lívia Körtvélyessy (eds.), The Edinburgh handbook
of evaluative morphology, 108-120. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Tovena, Lucia M. & Marta Donazzan. 2017. Italian -ata event nouns and
the nomen vicis interpretation. Italian Journal of Linguistics 29(1).
75-100.
Tovena, Lucia M. & Alain Kihm. 2008. Event-internal pluractional verbs
in some Romance languages. Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes 37.
9-30.
Weidhaas, Thomas & Hans-Jörg Schmid. 2015. Diminutive verbs in German:
Semantic analysis and theoretical implications. Morphology 25(2).
183–228. DOI: 10.1007/s11525-015-9258-z.


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