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Recent pragmatic accounts of slurs argue that the offensiveness of slurs is generated by a speaker's free choice to use a slur opposed to a more appropriate and semantically equivalent neutral counterpart. I argue that the theoretical role of neutral counterparts on such views is overstated. I consider two recent pragmatic analyses, Bolinger (Noûs, 51, 2017, 439) and Nunberg (New work on speech acts, Oxford University Press, 2018), which rely heavily upon the optionality of slurs, namely, that a speaker exercises a deliberate lexical choice to use a slur when they could have easily used a neutral counterpart instead. Against such views, I argue that across a range of different offensive uses of slurs, a speaker's choice to use a slur opposed to a neutral counterpart plays little to no role in accounting for why the slur generates offence. Such cases cast serious doubt upon the explanatory depth of these pragmatic analyses, and raise more general concerns for views which draw upon the relationship between a slur and its neutral counterpart. The main upshot is this: theorists should exercise caution in assuming that neutral counterparts play any fundamental or systemic role in explaining why slurs are offensive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about group slurs, that is, expressions that are I prima facie i 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 ethnicity ("spic"), race ("nigger"), sexual orientation ("faggot"), religion ("kike"), political ideology ("fascist"), habits or ways of living ("whore"), etc.[1] SP , sp [2] Our purpose is twofold: (i) explaining their expressive meaning in terms of a version of stereotype semantics and (ii) grounding a distinction between predicative/argumental and epithetic occurrences of (some) slur words on the different syntactic configuration of the sentences containing them. Now, there are two main respects in which slurs can be thought to be different from natural kind terms in as far as their respective stereotypes are concerned: first, unlike natural kind stereotypes, slur stereotypes typically include I evaluative concepts i and encode a I negative global value; i second, unlike natural kind stereotypes, slur stereotypes constitute an I expressive meaning dimension. i These two aspects will be further developed in the next two subsections. The stereotype valence is not thus determined by (the valences of) its constitutive concepts but by the prejudicial belief that the target group must be subordinated, on grounds of the existence of well-entrenched discriminatory attitudes.[7] That is why each feature of the semantic stereotype, even the purely descriptive ones (such as, in our previous example, WITH A SPANISH ACCENT) turns out to be regarded as a trace or indicator of the subordinate status in question. [Extracted from the article]

The noun "tinker", like the term "Gypsy", is a pejorative for the Roma, yet the verb "to tinker" is not pejorative. But the main point is that although the verb "to tinker" is a denominalized form of "tinker", which is a pejorative, the verb is not itself pejorative. We speculate that the denominalization of a functional noun produces a verb that picks up the function but does not, or need not, retain the derogatory features of the noun, in cases in which the noun is a pejorative. For our purposes, however, the important point is that, even on Hom's view, I fully competent i speakers would know that a pejorative noun "N" has pejorative force for they would know that it means something like 'is contemptible for having such and such features due to being N*', where "N*" is a non-pejorative term referring to the identifiable group in question. [Extracted from the article]