A puzzle about pejoratives.

Pejoratives are the class of expressions that are meant to insult or disparage. They include swear words and slurs. These words allow speakers to convey emotional states beyond the truth-conditional contents that they are normally taken to encode. The puzzle arises because, although pejoratives seem...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philosophical Studies Vol. 159; no. 3; pp. 383 - 406
Main Author: Hom, Christopher
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Jul2012
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        10.1007/s11098-011-9749-7
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        au: Hom, Christopher
        affil: Department of Philosophy, Texas Tech University, Lubbock USA
      su:
        Philosophy of language
        Expressive language
        Invective
        Semantics
        Externalism (Philosophy of mind)
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        subj:
          Philosophy of language
          Expressive language
          Invective
          Semantics
          Externalism (Philosophy of mind)
      keyword:
        Pejoratives
        Pragmatics
      ab: Pejoratives are the class of expressions that are meant to insult or disparage. They include swear words and slurs. These words allow speakers to convey emotional states beyond the truth-conditional contents that they are normally taken to encode. The puzzle arises because, although pejoratives seem to be a semantically unified class, some of their occurrences are best accounted for truth-conditionally, while others are best accounted for non-truth-conditionally. Where current, non-truth-conditional, views in the literature fail to provide a unified solution for the puzzle, this paper motivates a novel, semantic, analysis of pejorative language. The significance of the proposed solution is not only linguistic in nature, but also philosophical, as it both provides a new argument for, and sheds further light on, the nature of semantic externalism.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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