POLYSEMY IN THE EVALUATIVE SPHERE

In-person: Faculty of Letters, University of Porto, Via Panorâmica s/n
Online: Zoom
​

This is a biweekly seminar pertaining to my project Slurs and the Lexicon: A Rich-Lexicon Approach to Slurs and Other Evaluative Expressions - LEXISLUR (2023.05952.CEECIND). The main aim of the project is to offer a polysemy account fit for evaluative expressions and to assess to what extent a unified approach to the entire evaluative sphere is feasible. Much work on polysemy can be found in lexical semantics - the branch of semantics that studies the meaning of words, their internal structure and interrelations, etc. However, while the debate about polysemy of various expressions has produced an impressive amount of work, not much material on the polysemy of evaluative expressions exists in that area. The purpose of this seminar is twofold: first, to get acquainted with the essential literature on polysemy (via in-person sessions dedicated to reading and discussing the relevant papers); second, to feature current work on polysemy as applied to evaluative expressions (via online talks by invited speakers). In this way, participants will both acquire knowledge about polysemy in general and see how the discussions in lexical semantics can be applied to the evaluative sphere.


The next invited talk is on

​MAY 22, 11:00-12:30 WEST
Tamara Dobler (Free University of Amsterdam), "Derogation by Co-composition: Nominal Structure and Evaluative Meaning"
Slurs and other derogatory expressions are strikingly concentrated in nominal constructions. This talk examines a systematic contrast between adjectival and nominal uses of the same lexical item (i.e., cross-categorial polysemy):
(1) Charlie is gay/Black/disabled.
(2) Charlie is a gay/a Black/a disabled.
While the lexical root is held constant, nominal constructions readily acquire derogatory or expressive interpretations. Existing accounts explain this contrast in terms of kind reference and essentialism: nominal constructions ascribe membership in a kind and thereby encourage essentializing interpretations (Ritchie 2021; Neufeld 2019; see Koch 2023; Schaden and Gasparri 2026). I propose an alternative co-compositional account inspired by the Generative Lexicon framework (Pustejovsky 1995; see also Zeman 2025; Popescu and Zeman, forthcoming). The central claim is that derogation emerges from the interaction between lexical roots and count nominal structure. Roots are associated with heterogeneous conceptual content, including socially shared beliefs and stereotypes, some of which may carry evaluative or discriminatory content. Count nominal categorisers, by contrast, impose individuation and kind-based classification, requiring relatively stable criteria for category membership. Through co-composition, salient evaluative associations can thereby become category-constitutive. In other words, co-composition with count nominal structure converts salient evaluative associations into criteria for category membership. This explains why nominal constructions tend to promote derogatory interpretations, whereas adjectival predication merely attributes a property without the same classificatory force. More generally, the proposal argues that the perceived evaluative meaning is not purely lexical, but emerges from the interaction between lexical content and grammatical structure.


The next reading group is on

MAY 25, 15:00-16:30 WEST, online
John Collins & Agustin Vicente, "Propositions: Morals from Copredication", Synthese 207: 13, 2026.



Reading group meetings

Past meetings:
OCTOBER 15, 16:30-18:00 WET, room 209: Michelle Liu, "Polysemy and Philosophy", Philosophy Compass 20: e70040, 2025.
NOVEMBER 5, 15:00-16:30 WET, room 211: Marina Ortega-Andrés & Agustín Vicente, "Polysemy and Co-predication", Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1, 2019.
DECEMBER 11, 15:00-16:30 WET, online: Jake Quilty-Dunn, "Polysemy and Thought: Toward a Generative Theory of Concepts", Mind & Language, 36, 158-185, 2021 (in collaboration with the Philosophy Lab, University of Valencia).
JANUARY 20, 11:00-12:30 WET, online: Emanuel Viebhan, "Copredication, Polysemy and Context-sensitivity", Inquiry 65(8): 1066-1082, 2022 (in collaboration with the Philosophy Lab, University of Valencia).
FEBRUARY 3, 11:00-12:30 WET, online: Susanna Schellenberg, "The polysemy of 'I'", Mind & Language, 2025 (in collaboration with the Philosophy Lab, University of Valencia).
FEBRUARY 23, 15:00-16:30 WET, online: David Liebesman & Ofra Magidor, "Copredication and Property Inheritance", Philosophical Issues 27: 131-166, 2017 (in collaboration with the Philosophy Lab, University of Valencia).
MARCH 16, 15:00-16:30 WEST, online: John Collins, "Copredication as Illusion", Journal of Semantics 40: 359-389, 2024 (in collaboration with the Philosophy Lab, University of Valencia).
MAY 4, 15:00-16:30 WEST, online: Gabor Brody & Roman Feiman, "Polysemy does not exist, at least not in the relevant sense", Mind & Language 39, 179-200, 2024 (in collaboration with the Philosophy Lab, University of Valencia).

Prospective readings:
Nicholas Asher, Lexical Meaning in Context: A Web of Words, Cambridge University Press, 2011 (excerpts).
Robyn Carston, "Polysemy: pragmatics and sense conventions", Mind & Language 36(1): 108-133, 2021.
John Collins, "Copredication as illusion", Journal of Semantics 40(2-3): 359-389, 2023.
Steven Frisson, "Semantic underspecification in language processing", Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1): 111-127, 2009.
Lotte Hogeweg & Agustin Vicente, "On the nature of the lexicon", Journal of Linguistics 56(4): 865-891, 2020.
Ray Jackendoff, Semantic Structures, MIT Press, 1990 (excerpts).
Ingrid Lossius Falkum & Agustin Vicente, "Polysemy", Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2020.
James Pustejovsky, The generative Lexicon, MIT Press, 1995.
Petra Schumacher, "When combinatorial processing results in reconceptualization: Towards a new approach of compositionality", Frontiers of Psychology 4: 677, 2013.
Agustin Vicente, "Polysemy and word meaning", Philosophical Studies, 175(4): 947-968, 2018.
Agustin Vicente, "Approaches to co-predication", Journal of Pragmatics 182: 348-357, 2021.


Invited talks
(Fridays, 11:00-12:30 WET)

Past talks:

OCTOBER 31
Michelle Liu (Monash University), "Ad Hoc Concepts, Polysemy, and Verbal Disputes"
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”.

NOVEMBER 21
Marina Ortega-Andrés (University of the Basque Country), ​"When this chef says pot: The importance of the speaker's identity in understanding ambiguous words"
In this talk I will explore how listeners interpret ambiguous words based on their previous experience with specific speakers. A widely accepted assumption in psychology and linguistics is that, over the course of life, speakers accumulate vast statistical information about language use—including not only the contexts in which certain words are typically used but also the relative frequency of their meanings. This information should guide (alongside other factors) our interpretations: in absence of more contextual information, we tend to assign words their most frequent or dominant meaning. However, recent studies have shown that these preferences are not fixed. A single exposure to a word in a disambiguated context can alter its later interpretation, at least temporarily. For example, after hearing bark referring to tree bark, listeners tend to associate the word with that meaning—even though it is less frequent—rather than its more dominant meaning ("dog’s bark"). This phenomenon, known as word meaning priming, can last for hours or even days, suggesting that previous experience can alter the listener’s probabilistic estimates about what a word probably means. In a series of experimental studies, we investigated whether this effect also depends on the identity of the speaker. Participants heard one speaker (e.g., a chef) consistently using ambiguous words (like pot) to refer to things related to cooking (cooking pot) in a thematically related context (cooking dinner for a birthday party). After that, participants heard a speaker (who could be the same or a different speaker) asking "which picture goes best with the word pot?" Participants had to pick the image that answered the question. We found that when the speaker was the same in both tasks, participants picked the image that was related to the primed sense (i.e. the cooking pot) more often than when there was no previous story. However, when the speaker was different in each task, the probability of selecting the primed meaning significantly decreased, even when both speakers were chefs. This result suggests that listeners sometimes retain previous uses of a word by one speaker for future encounters with the same speaker. However, if a different speaker—even another chef—uses the same word, listeners tend to access the more frequent meaning of the word (“plant pot”) again. We interpret this result as meaning that experience with specific individuals talking about a given topic shapes semantic expectations in future interactions with that same person.These expectations do not transfer to other speakers and even when the two speakers belong to the same group (such as being a chef) is not enough to generalize the interpretation from one speaker to another. Thus, access to meaning may be partly shaped by local, personal, and dynamic experiences with individual speakers. This invites us to consider that the mental lexicon is flexible and that semantic access may partially be speaker specific.

JANUARY 16
Louis Kohlmann (Humboldt University) & Emanuel Viebahn (University of Hamburg), "Coining a slur: on the pejoration of ‘fake news’"
The aim of this talk is to argue that the expression ‘fake news’ has been turned into a slur: in addition to its descriptive meaning applying to pieces of information or reports, it has gained a novel pejorative meaning that slurs journalists. To this end, we survey descriptive and pejorative uses of ‘fake news’. We show that pejorative uses display features that are typically exhibited by slurs, and argue that such uses are best captured by views on which the expression has become ambiguous, with one descriptive and one pejorative meaning. Finally, we consider the process of pejoration through which ‘fake news’ was turned into a slur and how this process differs from mechanisms of reclamation.

MARCH 27
Katarzyna Kijania-Placek & Maciej Tarnowski (Jagiellonian University), "What 'We' Can Mean"
In this talk, we present a semantic account of the first-person plural pronoun - "we" in English - that comprises all systematic kinds of use of this expression. We argue that "we" exhibits five systematic types of meaning - directly referential, descriptive, deferred, anaphoric, and bound - each associated with a distinct Kaplan-style character. We show that these different meanings of "we" satisfy standard diagnostics for systematic polysemy, including non-zeugmatic co-predication across different senses, cross-linguistic robustness, and productivity across other plural pronouns and singular terms. Building on this, we introduce a two-dimensional model of polysemy in which lexical meaning consists of a set of rule-based characters capable of generating context-sensitive contents. This framework, which naturally extends to other singular terms, including demonstratives and proper names, preserves the Kaplanian treatment of indexicality while explaining descriptive and deferred uses of indexicals.

MAY 22
Tamara Dobler (Free University of Amsterdam), "Derogation by Co-composition: Nominal Structure and Evaluative Meaning"
Slurs and other derogatory expressions are strikingly concentrated in nominal constructions. This talk examines a systematic contrast between adjectival and nominal uses of the same lexical item (i.e., cross-categorial polysemy):
(1) Charlie is gay/Black/disabled.
(2) Charlie is a gay/a Black/a disabled.
While the lexical root is held constant, nominal constructions readily acquire derogatory or expressive interpretations. Existing accounts explain this contrast in terms of kind reference and essentialism: nominal constructions ascribe membership in a kind and thereby encourage essentializing interpretations (Ritchie 2021; Neufeld 2019; see Koch 2023; Schaden and Gasparri 2026). I propose an alternative co-compositional account inspired by the Generative Lexicon framework (Pustejovsky 1995; see also Zeman 2025; Popescu and Zeman, forthcoming). The central claim is that derogation emerges from the interaction between lexical roots and count nominal structure. Roots are associated with heterogeneous conceptual content, including socially shared beliefs and stereotypes, some of which may carry evaluative or discriminatory content. Count nominal categorisers, by contrast, impose individuation and kind-based classification, requiring relatively stable criteria for category membership. Through co-composition, salient evaluative associations can thereby become category-constitutive. In other words, co-composition with count nominal structure converts salient evaluative associations into criteria for category membership. This explains why nominal constructions tend to promote derogatory interpretations, whereas adjectival predication merely attributes a property without the same classificatory force. More generally, the proposal argues that the perceived evaluative meaning is not purely lexical, but emerges from the interaction between lexical content and grammatical structure.

JUNE
Jessica Kaiser, TBA