We are thrilled to announce the EPITHETS & STAL 2025 Workshop - Genoa, May 7th-8th 2025 on (negative and positive) expressives and slurs across languages. 

EPITHETS (Explaining Pejoratives In THeoretical and Experimental TermS) is a multi-center project (UniGE, UniMiB, UniSR) that combines theoretical and experimental methods in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology to investigate negative expressives. 

STAL (Slurring Terms Across Languages) is an international and interdisciplinary workshop whose primary aim is to gather work on slurs from languages that have been seldom discussed and less studied phenomena in the recent philosophical and semantic literature, and in particular, from sign languages and non-Indo-European languages.

Invited Speakers

• Masha Esipova (Bar-Ilan University)
• Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California)

Submission Guidelines

We invite submission of abstracts for 50-minute talks (30-minute presentation + 20 minutes for Q&A). Abstracts should be anonymous, the main text should be 2 pages long, with an optional third page for glossed examples, references, or figures (Note: use a third page for examples only when they are non-English examples and are glossed.) Abstracts are due before December 10, 2024, and should be submitted via EasyChair. We expect to notify the authors of their acceptance by February.

Special Session

EPITHETS & STAL-2025 will include a special session Valence asymmetries in expressive language, supported by the ERC Advanced Grant VALENCE ASYMMETRIES n°101142133.

(https://www.upf.edu/web/valence-asymmetries)

For this session, we invite contributions on issues concerned with the positive, negative, or ambivalent valence of expressive terms. In particular, we encourage: (1) empirical studies (experimental, corpus and field studies) concerned with the valence of expressive terms (incl. slurs, pejoratives, amelioratives); (2) analyses of how the valence of a term can shift (as, for example, in slur reclamation). The ERC Grant can pay for the travel and accommodation of the contributor(s). Please indicate whether you want your contribution to be considered for the special session. (Submissions deemed insufficiently relevant to this session will still be considered for the general session.)(NOTE: We are aware that mentioning terms like slurs is a controversial issue. We will not, however, take a stance on this matter, but we'd like to ask submitters to be sensitive to the issue.)

We especially encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply.

Committees

Scientific Committee

• Justina Berskyte (University of Manchester)
• Heather Burnett (CNRS/Paris Cité University)
• Bianca Cepollaro (University Vita-Salute San Raffaele)
• Filippo Domaneschi (University of Genoa)
• Masha Esipova (Bar-Ilan University)
• Leopold Hess (Jagiellonian University)
• Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California)
• Chang Liu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
• Nicolas Lo Guercio (CONICET/University of Buenos Aires) 
• Elin McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University)
• Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos (University of Oslo)
• Andrés Saab (SADAF/University of Buenos Aires)
• Isidora Stojanovic (Pompeu Fabra University)
• Simone Sulpizio (University of Milano-Bicocca)
• Dan Zeman (University of Porto)

Program Committee

• Bianca Cepollaro (Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele)
• Filippo Domaneschi (DAFIST, Università di Genova)
• Dan Zeman (University of Porto and MLAG)
• Isidora Stojanovic (Pompeu Fabra University)

Organizing Committee

• Alessandra Zappoli (University of Genoa)
• Veronica Repetti (University of Genoa)
• Nicolò D'Agruma (University Vita-Salute San Raffaele)
• Giulia Giunta (University of Milano Bicocca)

See you in Genoa!

The Organizing Committee

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to stalepithets2025@gmail.com