In the Thick of It. Do Thick Terms Constitute a Distinctive Class of Affectively-charged Language?

Matteo Colombo (Tilburg University), Giovanni Cassani

The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home) invites you to a talk by Matteo Colombo and Giovanni Cassani (Tilburg University) entitled ""In the Thick of It. Do Thick Terms Constitute a Distinctive Class of Affectively-charged Language?" The talk will take place online on OCTOBER 14, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time (CET), and is part of the of STAL Seminar series (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to participate, please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link. Below you can find the abstract.

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

Words like ‘courageous’, ‘clever’, ‘gullible’, ‘smelly’ and ‘tasty’ are examples of what philosophers call thick terms, which have a significant degree of descriptive content and are evaluatively loaded, too. Thick terms have been contrasted with purely evaluative terms like ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, and descriptive terms like ‘Dutch’, ‘tall’ and ‘pink’. Despite the amount of attention thick terms have received in philosophy, however, it is unclear whether they constitute a homogeneous class of evaluative terms with characteristic psycholinguistic properties, and whether the psycholinguistic properties of thick terms are reducible to their “valence norms” (i.e., the degree of pleasantness/unpleasantness elicited by a word). In this talk, we explore these two questions based on computational modelling and behavioural data in English, Dutch and Italian. Our results indicate that, compared to other affectively-charged words, thick terms have characteristic psycholinguistic and information properties irreducible to valence norms.