It's Not What You Said, It's the Way You Said It: Slurs and Conventional Implicatures

• DOI: 10.1111/phib.12024
• Publication Date: 2013-09-12T10:01:29Z
• Authors: Daniel Whiting
• Keywords: 0602 languages and literature; 06 humanities and the arts; 400

In this paper, I defend against a number of criticisms an account of slurs, according to which the same semantic content is expressed in the use of a slur (e.g. 'chink') as is expressed in the use of its neutral counterpart (e.g. 'Chinese'), while in addition the use of a slur conventionally implicates a negative, derogatory attitude. Along the way, I criticise competing accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of slurs, namely, Hom's 'combinatorial externalism' and Anderson and Lepore's 'prohibitionism'.