Communicating with Slurs.
An adequate linguistic theory of slurs must address three major aspects of their meaning: descriptive, evaluative and expressive. Slurs denote specific groups, they are used to convey speakers' evaluative attitudes, and some have a very strong emotional impact. In this paper, I argue that a variety...
| Published in: | Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 69; no. 277; pp. 795 - 817 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Oxford University Press / USA
Oct2019
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=138760412&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 138760412 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00318094 PHQ jtl: Philosophical Quarterly issn: 00318094 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Oct2019 vid: 69 iid: 277 pid: 622 pub: Oxford University Press / USA artinfo: ui: 138760412 10.1093/pq/pqz022 ppf: 795 ppct: 22 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 215KB tig: atl: Communicating with Slurs. aug: au: Rappaport, Jesse affil: The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, USA su: Discriminatory language Pragmatics Communication Swearing (Profanity) Linguistics sug: subj: Discriminatory language Pragmatics Communication Swearing (Profanity) Linguistics keyword: communication expletives pejoratives pragmatics slurs speaker's meaning ab: An adequate linguistic theory of slurs must address three major aspects of their meaning: descriptive, evaluative and expressive. Slurs denote specific groups, they are used to convey speakers' evaluative attitudes, and some have a very strong emotional impact. In this paper, I argue that a variety of mechanisms are required to account for this range of properties. Semantically, slurs simply denote the groups that they target. Pragmatically, speakers use slurs to show, in the Relevance-Theoretic sense, that they share a negative attitude towards the targeted group. However, this does not yet explain the capacity of certain 'toxic' slurs to express strong emotions of the speaker and to elicit a strong emotional reaction in hearers. In order to account for this psychological impact, I posit that, like curse words, slurs undergo distinct neurolinguistic processing that links them directly to emotional centers in the brain. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: © 2019 Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St. Andrews. item: Philosophical Quarterly holder: Oxford University Press / USA dt: @attributes: year: 2019 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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