This workshop is a follow-up to the first EvalMo Workshop held in Berlin in 2024 and is partially funded by the SLE Joint Initiative Scheme. The main focus of the Unlocking Evaluative Morphology series is the morphological expression of evaluative semantics (Grandi & Körtvélyessy 2015), such as diminution (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994), intensification (Rainer 2015), pejoration (Finkbeiner, Meibauer & Wiese 2016), or approximation (Masini, Norde & Van Goethem 2023). These are not discrete categories: in fact, many evaluative morphemes express more than one evaluative value. Approximation, for example, often intersects with pejoration (Amiot & Stosic 2022, Van Goethem & Norde 2020). This is evident in suffixes such as -ish in apish and girlish (Eitelmann, Haugland & Haumann 2020), or in prefixes such as pseudo- in pseudo-beer (Van Goethem, Norde & Masini 2025). Likewise, metonymization also underlies pejorative nuances, as observed in suffixoids derived from body parts, such as -head in gearhead (Sánchez Fajardo & Mattiello 2025; Mattiello & Sánchez Fajardo 2025), where the body part gains evaluative connotations linked to its functions. Notably, pejorative morphology should also be approached from a morphopragmatic perspective, which focuses on pragmatic meanings emerging through morphological rules (Merlini Barbaresi & Dressler 2020: 406).
EvalMo II aims to zoom in more specifically on semantic and pragmatic properties of evaluative morphology, addressing the following Research Questions:
For this workshop, we invite empirically-based studies addressing one or more of the above RQs. While the workshop will cover different evaluative values, it will place particular emphasis on pejorative morphology. Case studies on understudied languages are particularly welcome.
The workshop will be held on site (with the possibility to participate online if you are unable to travel to Alicante).
Elisa Mattiello (University of Pisa)
If you are interested in participating in this workshop, please send an anonymous abstract of max. 500 words (excluding examples and references) to Tijana Vesić Pavlović (tvesic@mas.bg.ac.rs). In a separate file, send us a cover sheet including your name, affiliation, title and presentation preference (oral paper or poster). The deadline for submissions is January 30, 2026; notification of acceptance will be sent out by February 20, 2026.
The workshop fee is 40 € (free of charge for PhD students).
Amiot, Dany & Dejan Stosic. 2022. Evaluative morphology: From evaluation to approximation and semi-categorization. In Vassiliadou, Hélène & Marie Lammert (Eds.), Clear and Approximate Categorization. A crosslinguistic Perspective, 53–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Lavinia M. Barbaresi. 1994. Morphopragmatics. Diminutives and intensifiers in Italian, German, and other languages. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Eitelmann, Matthias, Kari Haugland & Dagmar Haumann. 2020. From engl-isc to whatever-ish: a corpus-based investigation of –ish derivation in the history of English. English Language and Linguistics 24(4). 801–831.
Finkbeiner, Rita, Jörg Meibauer & Heike Wiese (eds.). 2016. Pejoration. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Grandi, Nicola & Livia Körtvelyessy. 2015. Introduction: Why evaluative morphology? In Nicola Grandi & Lívia Körtvélyessy (Eds.), The Edinburgh handbook of evaluative morphology, 3–20. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Merlini Barbaresi, Lavinia & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2020. Pragmatic explanations in morphology. In Vito Pirrelli, Ingo Plag & Wolfgang U. Dressler (eds.), Word Knowledge and Word Usage: A Cross-Disciplinary Guide to the Mental Lexicon, 405-452. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Masini, Francesca, Muriel Norde & Kristel Van Goethem (eds.) 2023. Approximation in morphology. Special issue of Journal of Word Formation 7(1).
Mattiello, Elisa & José A. Sánchez Fajardo. 2025. The evaluative suffixoid -head and its Spanish and Italian equivalents. Folia Linguistica. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2025-0063.
Rainer, Franz. 2015. Intensification. In Müller, Peter O., Ingeborg Ohnheiser, Susan Olsen & Franz Rainer (Eds.), Word-formation: An international handbook of the languages of Europe, vol. 2, 1339–1351. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.
Sánchez Fajardo, José A. & Elisa Mattiello. 2025. From spearhead to crackhead: Unraveling the morphosemantic development of English -head through a network of constructions. Word Structure 18(1–2). 119–148. https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2025.0248.
Van Goethem, Kristel & Muriel Norde. 2020. Extravagant “fake” morphemes in Dutch. Morphological productivity, semantic profiles and categorical flexibility. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 16(3), 425-458.
Van Goethem, Kristel, Muriel Norde & Francesca Masini. 2025. The fate of ‘pseudo-’ words: A contrastive corpus-based analysis. Languages in Contrast 25(1). 23–50. https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.22003.van.