NEW ICREA 
Stojanovic, Isidora
Humanities
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Department Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge
Address Carrer Roc Boronat 138
Postal code 08018
City Barcelona
Keywords
Research interests
In the past 5 years I have worked as a full time researcher, first as CNRS Research Director at the Jean Nicod Institute, and since Fall 2024, as Distinguished Researcher at UPF, to which I brought my ERC Advanced Grant “VALENCE ASYMMETRIES: the positive, the negative, the good and the bad in language, mind and morality”.
My research sits at the interface between philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science, and addresses issues related to context-dependence as well as subjectivity, and the ways they affect language and cognition. In the past 5 years, my main focus has been on expressive and evaluative language, with a research output of 10 research articles (9 published, 1 forthcoming), two articles for major handbooks (OUP and Routledge), and editorship of one topical collection (Topoi).
My research has helped advance our understanding of the way valence and value interact, and the mechanisms that speakers use to express and convey not only beliefs but also emotions and value judgments. The issues addressed include:
- An account of the semantic structure of expressions that reflect subjective and evaluative points of view, such as aesthetic and moral adjectives;
- A theoretical and empirical study of subjective expressions that are not lexically valenced, but can acquire positive or negative valence depending on the context;
- A careful analysis of a variety of negative expressives, including slurs and pejoratives, by both experimental and corpus means, and the implications their use generates depending on shared assumptions and attitudes.
The experimental studies undertaken in my ERC project are still in progress, but our initial results, which show novel valence asymmetries (esp. in the moral domain) are extremely promising and potentially groundbreaking.
My work stands out for its increasing appeal to empirical methods, including experimental methods from psychology as well as corpus studies, to address recent as well as long-standing issues in philosophy.
