Slurs and expletives: a case against a general account of expressive meaning ☆
By D. Blakemore. 2015
100 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper argues against the case for treating slurs alongside expletives in a general account of expressive meaning (cf Hedger, 2102, 13; Kaplan, 1997; Richard, 2008). Working within a relevance theoretic account of communication (. Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95), it argues that expletives (e.g. damn) have no descriptive content and pattern with smiles, gestures and tone of voice which are used to trigger procedures for the identification of emotional states. In contrast, slurs have descriptive content - content which provides a means of identifying the group of individuals they are used to target. However, (contra Hom, 2008) the offensive attitude a slur communicates is not part of its encoded content, but is derived from the meta-linguistic knowledge that the word is an offensive means of predicating and referring. This knowledge raises an expectation of relevance which is satisfied only if the hearer attributes the hearer with an indeterminate range of assumptions from the cultural stereotype which his use of the word evokes.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f128e6a7d62ab224982c2a3121a6f19f3c8aa5a0
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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
In Language and Linguistics
In Literature and Literary Theory
Citations in the corpus
- COLD: Annotation scheme and evaluation data set for complex offensive language in English (2020, background): “Pejorative lexical items generally target one or more specific individuals on a personal basis (13), and slurs target individuals based on characteristics of the group (Hay, 2013; Blakemore, 2015; Bach, 2018).”
- The heterogeneity of procedural meaning (2016, background): “…of voice and 569 other kinds of emotional prosody (Wharton & Wilson 2006), expletives, diminutives 570 and NP epithets like ‘the bastard’, ‘the poppet’ (Blakemore 2011, 2015).2 One of the 571 issues I will set aside is the extent to which the cases included here count as properly 572 linguistic or…”