37.3012, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Toxic Language: Pragmatics of Harm (Finland)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3012. Mon Sep 21 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3012, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Toxic Language: Pragmatics of Harm (Finland)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, 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: Valeriia Vyshnevetska <valeriia at linguistlist.org>

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


Date: 18-Sep-2026
From: Xi Chen [zoexi.chen at ntu.edu.sg]
Subject: Panel at IPC20 - Toxic Language: Pragmatics of Harm


Panel at IPC20 - Toxic Language: Pragmatics of Harm
Short Title: IPrA2027
Theme: Toxic Language: Pragmatics of Harm

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Xi Chen
Contact Email: zoexi.chen at ntu.edu.sg
Meeting URL: https://ipra2027.exordo.com/dashboard

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Pragmatics;
Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

Organizer:
Xi Chen (Nanyang Technological University)
Lucien Brown (Monash University)
Language has the capacity to cause profound social and interpersonal
harm. Through interaction and discourse, individuals and groups may be
excluded, dehumanised, stigmatised, marginalised, or subjected to
moral condemnation and social control. In this panel, we explore this
harmful side of language via the notion of “toxic language.”
Within pragmatics, toxic language is rather an underrepresented
concept, compared to impoliteness, rudeness, offence, and aggression.
However, it offers a distinct and productive framework for
understanding the pragmatics of harm. According to Chen and Brown
(forthcoming), toxic language refers to discursive linguistic
practices that categorise individuals and/or social groups by
marginalising them from the speaker’s conception of humankind,
evaluate them by positioning them in opposition to the moral values
claimed by the speaker, and regulate them through the authority
assumed by the speaker. This definition, gleaned from extensive
analysis of first-order data, reflects how the term “toxic” is
commonly used by laypersons as an emic description of harmful
interactions, discourses and personhoods, such as “toxic
relationships,” “toxic fans,” and toxic masculinities. The concept of
toxic language has already been widely adopted in Natural Language
Processing (NLP), particularly for discussions of the engineered
efforts to detect harmful content online. However, within NLP, it has
lacked a clear definition. Bringing these strands together, this panel
aims to advance pragmatic understandings of toxic language by focusing
on how language is used to produce, legitimise, and perpetuate harm.
This panel welcomes contributions on all areas of toxic language and
linguistic harm. Potential themes for paper contributions to this
panel include, but not restricted to, (i) the diversity of
categorisation, (im)moralisation, and authorisation practices in
real-world toxic language; (ii) the linguistic, contextual, and
distributional properties of toxic language; (iii) forms of toxic
language, for example, profanity, social biases, discrimination, which
harm social equality; (iv) machine-generated toxicity, e.g., social
biases in AI, and (v) cross-cultural variations in toxic language. By
bringing together these themes, the panel aims to establish toxic
language as a productive object of pragmatic inquiry and to advance
understanding of how language contributes to social harm. In doing so,
it seeks to build connections between pragmatics and sociolinguistics
through a shared concern with social equality and inclusion. Perhaps
more timely, the advances in toxic language through this panel will
help to connect the rich tradition of impoliteness studies in
pragmatics with the growing body of research on harm mitigation in AI
systems. We particularly welcome contributions from understudied
languages and marginalised communities, whose experiences of toxic
language remain underrepresented in existing scholarship.



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

********************** 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:

Australian Linguistics Society https://als.asn.au/Home

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

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

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

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

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

MDPI Languages https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages

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

SIL International Publications http://www.sil.org/resources/publications


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3012
----------------------------------------------------------