Slurs, stereotypes and epithets

ORLANDO, ELEONORA; SAAB, ANDRÉS

Ciudad de Buenos Aires

Workshop; I CLE-SADAF Workshop on Philosophy of Language, ?Semantics, Formalization and Languages?,; 2017

SADAF

This paper is about group slurs, i.e., expressions that are prima facie associated with the speaker?s conveyance of contemptuous or derogatory feelings for the members of a certain group of people identified in terms of their origin or descent ('spic'), race ('nigger'), sexual orientation ('faggot'), ethnia or religion ('kike'), political ideology ('fascist'), habits or ways of living ('slut'), etc. Our purpose is two-fold: (i) grounding a distinction between predicative and epithetic occurrences of slur-words on the different syntactic configuration of the sentences containing them, (ii) explaining the non-truth-conditional meaning that is common to both kinds of occurrences in terms of a version of stereotype semantics.