Expressivity cross-linguistically: A corpus study of expressive and evaluative adjectives in Romance and Germanic

Xavier Villalba

The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home), an international and interdisciplinary network whose primary aim is to promote work on slurs, pejoratives, expressives and evaluative terms from less studied languages, invites you to the third talk of the 2025-2026 academic year. The invited speaker is Xavier Villalba (Autonomous University of Barcelona), who will give a talk entitled "Expressivity cross-linguistically: A corpus study of expressive and evaluative adjectives in Romance and Germanic" (see the abstract below). The event will take place online on Monday, DECEMBER 15, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time (CET), and is part of the of STAL network seminar series (program here: 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 of the talk.

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

In this presentation, I argue that pure expressive adjectives (such as English fucking and damn) represent the final stage in a process of intersubjectivization (Traugott 2010; Traugott & Dasher 2002). This process begins with a descriptive qualifying adjective, moves through a stage of subjectivization—typical of both evaluative adjectives (e.g., pathetic, horrible) and mixed expressive adjectives (bloody, shitty)—and culminates in the pure expressives.

This pragmatic shift is linked to semantic bleaching as well as syntactic changes traceable in our corpora. These changes involve features like gradation, function (modifier vs. predicative), and position (postnominal vs. prenominal modification). To support this claim, I will present two corpus studies:

1. A synchronic study designed to identify the most useful features for distinguishing each adjective class in Germanic and Romance languages.

2. A diachronic study, focused on English and Catalan, to trace the historical emergence of these features.

The results of these studies will provide a more accurate and comprehensive cross-linguistic understanding of expressive adjectives. Furthermore, they will offer insights into the patterns of change involved and how the speed of this evolution varies across different items and languages.