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Slurring is a kind of hate speech that has various effects. Notable among these is variable offence. Slurs vary in offence across words, uses, and the reactions of audience members. Patterns of offence aren’t adequately explained by current theories. We propose an explanation based on the unjust power imbalance that a slur seeks to achieve. Our starting observation is that in discourse participants take on discourse roles. These are typically inherited from social roles, but only exist during a discourse. A slurring act is a speech-act that alters the discourse roles of the target and speaker. By assigning discourse roles the speaker unjustly changes the power balance in the dialogue. This has a variety of effects on the target and audience. We show how these notions explain all three types of offence variation. We also briefly sketch how a role and power theory can help explain silencing and appropriation. Explanatory power lies in the fact that offence is correlated with the perceived unjustness of the power imbalance created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slurs such as chink and gook are linguistic expressions that are primarily used to derogate certain group members for their descriptive attributes (such as their ethnicity) and are often considered the most offensive of expressions. Recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of slurs has illuminated several important facts regarding their meaning and use – including that slurs are commonly understood to felicitously apply towards some targets yet not others, that slurs are among the most potentially offensive expressions afforded by natural language, and that slurs are often flexibly employed and of potential use, not only derogatorily to convey offense towards out-group members, but also non-derogatorily to convey affiliation with in-group members or to diminish the derogatory force that the slur is typically understood to carry. Nonetheless, prior scholarship has unfortunately restricted itself primarily to considerations of slurs that typically target members of other groups. Since no account of slurs for Asian-Americans has so far been proposed, the aim of this article is therefore to provide the first systematic and empirically informed analysis of slurs for Asian-Americans that accounts for both their derogatory and appropriative (non-derogatory) use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic slur terms ("nigger", "kike", "kraut") and other group-based slurs ("faggot", "spaz") must be differentiated from general pejoratives ("asshole", "idiot") and pure expressives ("fuck"). As these terms pejoratively refer to certain groups of people, they are a typical feature of hate speech contexts where they serve xenophobic speakers in expressing their hatred for an entire group of people. However, slur terms are actually far more frequently used in other contexts and are more often exchanged among friends than between enemies. Hate speech can be identified as the most central, albeit not the most frequent, mode of use. I broadly distinguish between hate speech (central use), other pejorative uses (mobbing, insulting), parasitic uses (banter, appropriation, comedy, youth language), neutral mentioning (academics, PC), and unaware uses. In this paper, authentic examples of use and frequency estimates from empirical research will help provide accurate definitions and insight into these different modes that purely theoretical approaches cannot achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the American English demonymhoosierrefers to Indiana residents, it means “poor, rural, white trash” in St. Louis, Missouri. This paper uses discourse analysis of several texts across a range of registers and formalities to explore why its use persists despite less-localized alternatives (redneck, etc.) and why it has become enregistered as a feature of the local dialect. Findings showhoosieris used to police the behavior of the target. Unlike similar slurs, its use requires knowledge of St. Louis’ social geography.Hoosierallows speakers to demonstrate localness while positioning themselves and St. Louis as cosmopolitan compared to the derided target. As such,hoosierasserts positive values for St. Louisans who use it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Coreferentialism refers to the common assumption in the literature that slurs (e.g. faggot) and descriptors (e.g. male homosexual) are coreferential expressions with precisely the same extension. For instance, Vallee (2014) recently writes that “If S is an ethnic slur in language L, then there is a non-derogatory expression G in L such that G and S have the same extension” (p. 79). The non-derogatory expression G is commonly considered the nonpejorative correlate (NPC) of the slur expression S (Hom, 2008) and it is widely thought that every S has a coreferring G that possesses precisely the same extension. Yet here I argue against this widespread assumption by first briefly introducing what slurs are and then considering four sources of supporting evidence showing that slurs and descriptors are in fact not coreferential expressions with precisely the same extension. I argue that since slurs and descriptors differ in their extension they thereby differ in their meaning or content also. This article additionally introduces the notion of a conceptual anchor in order to adequately account for the relationship between slurs and descriptors actually evidenced in the empirical data, and further considers the inadequacy of common dictionary definitions of slurs. This article therefore contributes to the literature on slurs by demonstrating that previous accounts operating on the assumption that slurs and descriptors are coreferential expressions with the same extension, and that they thereby have the same meaning or content, are inconsistent with empirical data and that an alternative account in accord with Croom (2011, 2013a, 2014b) better fits the facts concerning their actual meaning and use.

In September 2012, the Japanese celebrity and porn star Sora Aoi posted two messages on her Sina Weibo account expressing friendship between Japanese and Chinese citizens. The messages elicited more than 200,000 comments, ranging from virulently anti-Japanese to supportive. These comments are a unique corpus that captures how netizens engage in what Chinese scholars term online verbal violence. Using mixed methods to examine this corpus, this article identifies misogynistic and nationalist slurs and examines how these slurs are used, particularly when they interact with each other. These words not only express strong emotion or engage fellow commenters, but they also reference historical events and emphatically convey one's national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cappelen and Lepore (2005) claim that the English language contains a basic and limited set of context-sensitive expressions, as only expressions within this set pass the truth-related tests that they propose to single out context-sensitive from context-insensitive words. In this paper, I argue that racial and ethnic slurs also pass Cappelen and Lepore’s context sensitivity tests and that, as a result, slurs should also be seen as context-sensitive expressions in a truth-related sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this paper is to reevaluate the Compatibility Condition on the polarity/degree of emotional attitude for multiple expressive elements including slurs, epithets, anti-honorifics, intensifiers, and mitigators in Korean. The project provides new results obtained from a big data-based trend analysis including usages in Twitter, news articles, and blogs. Yoon (2015) investigated ethnic slurs that occur with other regular expressive elements, in order to examine the systematicity with which these expressive items interact with one another in determining emotional attitude. This prior analysis led to several important theoretical claims, but is limited in depending on intuition-based judgments and co-occurrence patterns in a relatively small corpus. For a general theory of compatibility of expressives, Korean is particularly important because its extensive use of expressives across lexical categories offers a perfect testing ground for examining dynamic interactions of various expressive items, and yet the findings are highly applicable to other languages. The present paper provides a follow-up study of Korean with more rigorous analysis of a larger data set that allows assessment of the validity of earlier claims. Two main issues are reexamined here: one concerns constraints on the Compatibility Condition and how to measure the degree of compatibility; and the second concerns how strict the compatibility condition of expressives is, and what happens if the condition is flouted. The new results from the big data-based trend analysis reveal which part of the prior theoretical analysis is valid in reality and which part requires revision. One implication of the current study is that, by specifying an Emotional Index for expressive items in the sentiment lexicon, the Compatibility Condition, as a grammatical constraint , predicts how multiple occurrences of compatible expressives can be used to strengthen a speaker's positive or negative emotion. Furthermore, we suggest a condition for rescuing by pragmatic effects as a secondary mode of pragmatic sanctioning in exceptional cases of co-occurrences of conflicting attitudinal components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I present a uniform account of two phenomena considered as independent so far: Appropriation of slurs and Variability of thick terms. My analysis relies on the notion of “echoic use” of language, proposed by Relevance Theory and employed by Bianchi (2014) to account for Appropriation. I argue that such echoic approach does not only explain Appropriation of slurs, as Bianchi claims, but it also accounts for Variability of thick terms. Moreover, I show how the relevance-theoretic distinction between merely attributive and echoic uses of language sheds light on the crucial distinction between the two often conflated phenomena of ‘suspension’ and ‘reversal’ of the evaluative content of slurs and thick terms. In addition to accounting for Appropriation and Variability, my proposal has the following theoretical outcome for the theory of thick terms: if variability cases are in fact derivative or parasitic uses of language, they do not challenge anymore the claim that the relation between thick terms and the associated evaluation is systematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late twentieth century, Buenos Aires has been widely publicized outside Argentina as a "gay-friendly" destination. This period has also seen increasing immigration to the city from other parts of South America, especially neighboring countries and others with sizeable indigenous populations. An ongoing popular national narrative highlights hyper-masculinity as a preeminently Argentine characteristic. Distinct discourses characterizing Argentina as racially white-majority and anti-foreign and anti-indigenous, overinvested in machismo and at the same time welcoming to nonheterosexual foreigners seem, on the surface, to be at odds. In this essay I explore intersections among race, gender, sexuality and foreign origin as cross-cutting planes of discourse, which are all subsumed within and constitutive of the Argentine national imaginary. While these distinct domains of reference can isolate and contain different sectors of Argentine society, I argue that it is the overlapping, simultaneous application of raced-sex terms that necessarily denies masculine superiority to others and promotes it among Argentine men. Ultimately, therefore, a "permissive" atmosphere cannot challenge heteronormativity. I consider the ways that racial and sexual epithets (including maricón and puto "fag," boliguayo "Bolivian + Paraguayan alien" or "Indian" and brasileño, literally "Brazilian" but code for "Afro-heritage/black") are differently used in conversational settings and media reports about sports teams and sporting events, especially soccer, as well as during those events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of slurs aim to explain how – via semantics, pragmatics, or other mechanisms – speakers who use slurs convey that targets are inferior persons. I present two novel problems. The Slur Creation Problem: How do terms come to be slurs? An expression ‘e’ is introduced into the language. What are the mechanisms by which ‘e’ comes to possess properties distinctive of slurs? The Bigotry Formation Problem: Speakers’ uses of slurs are a prime mechanism of bigotry formation, not solely bigotry perpetuation. With a use of a slur, how are speakers able to introduce new bigoted attitudes and actions toward targets? I argue that expressivism offers powerful resources to solve the problems.

Slurs are offensive expressions targeting individuals on the basis of their membership to certain social groups. Some authors have argued that the offensiveness of slurs is related to the semantic encoding of stereotypes in their meaning. As noticed by Robin Jeshion (2011, 2013a, 2013b), the stereotypical strategies do not seem to provide a satisfactory analysis of slurs’ functional traits. Herein, I propose to modify her view by making a distinction between two offensive dimensions of slurs: a negative expressive component encoded in the semantic content and directed toward a certain group of individuals, and the social generics related to that group conveyed as conversational implicatures.

We present the results of an experimental study that aims at establishing whether the offensive component of slurs exhibits nondisplaceability (Potts 2007). We found that the derogatory content survives in conditionals and questions (supporting a pragmatic approach), and diminishes in indirect reports (in line with presuppositional accounts); surprisingly, the offensiveness of slurs results almost nullified in negated sentences. In a second study, we explore the hypothesis that negated slurs were rated as not offensive because the negation was interpreted as metalinguistic.

Slurs are typically defined as conveying contempt based on group-membership. However, here I argue that they are not a unitary group. First, I describe two dimensions of variation among derogatives: how targets are identified, and how offensive the term is. This supports the typical definition of slurs as opposed to other derogatives. I then highlight problems with this definition, mainly caused by variable offence across slur words. In the process I discuss how major theories of slurs can account for variable offence, and conclude that contempt based on group-membership doesn’t cover all the data. I finish by noting that the most offensive slurs are those that target oppressed groups. I claim it is oppression that underpins most offence, and that beyond this offensive property, some slurs are actively used to oppress.

In this paper I spell out the conditions for a uniform analysis of thick terms and slurs, presented in Cepollaro and Stojanovic (2016). Our claim is that thick terms and slurs convey evaluations via presupposition and represent a device through which language implicitly conveys linguistically encoded evaluations. I introduce the presuppositional account (section 2) and elaborate on the conditions that need to be fulfilled for slurs and thick terms to be analyzed along similar lines (section 3) and I discuss the predictions that this approach offers about the issues of reference and extension (section 4). I conclude with some considerations about the role and functions of slurs and thick terms with respect to moral systems (section 5).

For some decades, we’ve been considering (and using) “b*d” words. Such a large part of the document space is made up of words; it seems necessary, upon occasion, to explore the crooked little paths and messy gutters occupied by some words. We invite your company on such a little exploration now.

Homophobic epithets have become commonly used insults among adolescents. However, evidence suggests that there are differences in how these homophobic epithets are evaluated based on beliefs held by the observer and the context in which they are used. To examine this, Italian high school students were asked to rate the offensiveness of homophobic epithets, as well as to consider how they or others would react to homophobic epithets across various situations. Homophobic beliefs and beliefs about the social acceptability of homophobic epithets were also examined. It was found that greater perceived social acceptability of homophobic epithets was related to dismissive reactions to their use, whereas homophobic beliefs were predictive of negative emotional reactions but in varying ways depending on the specific context. The results indicate that homophobic epithets may not always be perceived as homophobic by adolescents, and that attempts to alter the social acceptability of these insults may be an effective manner of reducing their use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors present a presuppositional account for a class of evaluative terms that encode both a descriptive and an evaluative component: slurs and thick terms. The authors discuss several issues related to the hybrid nature of these terms, such as their projective behavior, the ways in which one may reject their evaluative content, and the ways in which evaluative content is entailed or implicated (as the case may be) by the use of such terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The burgeoning literature on studies of swearing suggests that any acceptable definition of swearing involves three features: (a) non-literal meanings, (b) taboo subjects, and (c) emotions. It also suggests that swearwords fall into one of the three classes: aggressive, cathartic, or social. Driven by a rich corpus of swearwords from Persian, this paper argues that swearing in Persian does not necessarily involve these three features, and that a redefinition of swearing is needed. It then borrows ideas from ethics to suggest that any precise definition of swearing will have to involve the distinction between teleological and deontological ethics. It further envisages a continuum for swearing, with teleological ethics at one end and deontological ethics at the other, on which different forms of swearing can be arranged based on the degree to which they lean towards either end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slurring language has had a lot of recent interest, but the focus has been almost exclusively on racial slurs. Gendered pejoratives, on the other hand—terms like "slut," "bitch," or "sissy"—do not fit into existing accounts of slurring terms, as these accounts require the existence of neutral correlates, which, I argue, these gendered pejoratives lack. Rather than showing that these terms are not slurs, I argue that this challenges the assumption that slurs must have neutral correlates, and so that a new approach to thinking about the meaning of slurring terms is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Race talk in the US frequently singles out individuals as “racists,” positioning them as outliers in a society that has supposedly moved beyond race. However, this type of “language game” is premised upon a narrow understanding of racism that reduces it to individual bigotry while ignoring its systemic dimensions. This article examines the accusatory and exculpatory moves in this language game by analyzing three cases that received mainstream media attention. The analysis shows that the discursive moves ultimately work to reproduce dominant ideological assumptions, doing more to protect white privilege than to dismantle racism. This occurs even as speakers engage in ostensibly anti-racist talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being called names such as 'gay,' 'faggot,' 'lezzie' may be experienced as both harmful or harmless by adolescents, depending on the situation in which the name-calling occurs. The aim of this study was to explore how being called gay-related names by agents with whom the relationship is differentiated by friendship, acquaintance status and perceived likeability is associated with depressive symptoms, and to explore associations between gay-related name-calling, bullying and depressive symptoms. The participants were 921 ninth grade pupils (450 boys) with an age range from 14 to 15 years from 15 schools. The study reveals that the participants' depressive symptoms were more associated with being called gay-related names by someone who did not like them or someone they did not know, than with being called gay-related names by a friend. Being called gay-related names was associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms, even when controlling for bullying. Boys who were bullied and called gay-related names had even higher levels of depressive symptoms, as indicated by an interaction effect found between being called gay-related names and bullying. Because of the potential harmfulness of gay-related name-calling, anti-bullying programmes should address this topic as a part of their regular anti-bullying strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A folk assumption about colloquial speech is that taboo words are used because speakers cannot find better words with which to express themselves: because speakers lack vocabulary. A competing possibility is that fluency is fluency regardless of subject matter—that there is no reason to propose a difference in lexicon size and ease of access for taboo as opposed to emotionally-neutral words. In order to test these hypotheses, we compared general verbal fluency via the Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT) with taboo word fluency and animal word fluency in spoken and written formats. Both formats produced positive correlations between COWAT fluency, animal fluency, and taboo word fluency, supporting the fluency-is-fluency hypothesis. In each study, a set of 10 taboo words accounted for 55–60% of all taboo word data. Expressives were generated at higher rates than slurs. There was little sex-related variability in taboo word generation, and, consistent with findings that do not show a sex difference in taboo lexicon size, no overall sex difference in taboo word generation was obtained. Taboo fluency was positively correlated with the Big Five personality traits neuroticism and openness and negatively correlated with agreeableness and conscientiousness. Overall the findings suggest that, with the exception of female-sex-related slurs, taboo expressives and general pejoratives comprise the core of the category of taboo words while slurs tend to occupy the periphery, and the ability to generate taboo language is not an index of overall language poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last 15 years philosophers and linguists have turned their attention to slurs: derogatory expressions that target certain groups on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and so on. This interest is due to the fact that, on the one hand, slurs possess puzzling linguistic properties; on the other hand, the questions they pose are related to other crucial issues, such as the descriptivism/expressivism divide, the semantics/pragmatics divide and, generally speaking, the theory of meaning. Despite these recent investigations about pejoratives, there is no widely accepted explanation of slurs: in my paper I consider the intuitions we have about slurs and I assess the difficulties that the main theories encounter in explaining how these terms work in order to identify the phenomena that a satisfactory account of slurs needs to explain. Then, I focus on the pragmatic theories that deal with the notions of conventional implicature and pragmatic presupposition: I assess the objections that have been raised and I propose two ways of defending the presuppositional account, taking into consideration the notion of cancellability. I will claim that the reason why most pragmatic strategies seem to fail to account for slurs is that they assume a rigid divide between conventional implicatures and presuppositions that should not be taken for granted. Reconsidering the relationship between these two notions gives a hint about how a pragmatic account of slurs should look like. Finally, I assess the problem of which presupposition slurs in fact trigger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows the social role of the United States' logocratic history of citizenship and literacy through education brought to bear as an ideological scaffolding of ‘patriotism’ in the service of a new, growing, and overt racial poetics of violence against President Barack Obama and, as consequence, the constraints and possibilities to political black publics. This semiotic circulates beyond the ‘fringe’ and into the interaction of today's politicians, conservative think tanks, mass media pundits, and their consortia of elite special interest groups, lobbies, and markets. Its uptake and recirculation, particularly as massive mediatized everyday language, has brought into relief a narrating register of racial belonging hearkening from the social, political, and legal history of structural subjugation to minorities and black people in the United States since the founding words of its inception. Following the slurs and other tropes of racist talk, images, and memes, the study then examines how these structural histories inform and are used to naturalize an exclusionary rhetoric of violence in an immutable master narrative structuring a shared moral and democratic order. And, it looks to the descriptive violence as well as calls for action, all targeted at President Barack Obama's rupture to this moral order, limiting any arrangements of black collective political agency into improvisational contexts, at best. It follows such differentiation and regulation at two structuring levels: 1) the institutionalization of citizenship; and, 2) civic literacy through formal education of African–Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Derogatory terms can be powerful mechanisms of subordination, while re-appropriating these terms can be a strategy to fight back against social injustice. I argue that projects seeking to reclaim slurs have a performative structure that raises particular hazards. Whereas more familiar forms of protest may fail to bring about their intended result, attempts to re-appropriate slurs can fail to be understood as transgressive acts at all. When attempts at reclamation fail, their force is distorted; context and convention lead the hearer to give uptake to the speech act as a traditional deployment of the slur. The force of this traditional use is to validate and re-entrench the very norms the act was intended to subvert. This is the precarious structure of reclamation projects: when successful, reclamation is the subversion of powerful mechanisms of oppression, but when unsuccessful, the act has the ironic force of constituting mechanisms of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we relied on a mixed-methods approach to examine the contextual fluidities and nuances of racial discourse in a southwestern baked-goods workplace. Specifically, we extend upon previous findings on how stereotypes and slurs are racially unequal in a workplace setting, in order to investigate what is uniquely racist about the deployment of stereotypes and slurs and how racism shapes gendered and classed dimensions of these terms. Further, we empirically demonstrate how gender and class can be constructed along lines of racial ideology at micro-levels of interaction. Our argument is that racetalk does not operate independently or in isolation from other discourses like gendertalk and classtalk. Instead, racist comments are often expressed alongside classist and sexist comments by people, who simultaneously occupy multiple racial, class, and gender locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics of SlutWalk social movements claim that the term slut can never be empowering and that it is inherently derogatory. However, recent research suggests that the in-group can re-appropriate slurs successfully (e.g., Croom, 2013, Galinsky et al., 2013). In two experiments, we investigated whether the typically pejorative term slut can lead to positive social consequences when used in the context of a social justice movement. We exposed participants to the term slut and systematically varied the sex of the speaker (Study 1) and the context in which the slur was used (Studies 1 and 2). Women were less likely to endorse common rape myths after being exposed to slut in a supportive (i.e., SlutWalk march) relative to a nondescript context (i.e., yelled in the street), regardless of the sex of speaker (Study 1), and even when compared to baseline (i.e., absence of any mention of the term; Study 2). Moreover, within a supportive march context the use of the slur slut did not significantly lower women's feelings of empowerment relative to a slur-free women's march (Study 2). Taken together, results demonstrate that the slur slut is not inherently derogatory and can be re-appropriated under supportive march contexts. Implications for language re-appropriation in social demonstrations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slurs such as nigger tend to function as “disparaging remarks”: that is, they are an attempt by speakers (S) to deliberately deprecate a target – or targets (T) – in some way ( Croom, 2011 ). Accordingly, they can be seen to share the same pragmatic space as other verbally aggressive acts such as insults, put-downs, snubs and backhanded compliments (Jucker and Taavitsainen, 2000). Mention of backhanded compliments, in turn, serves as a useful reminder that compliments can be seen as representing the positive end of a larger pragmatic space relating to the speaker's evaluation of the addressee, with slurs and insults representing the negative end (Taavitsainen and Jucker, 2008) and back-handed compliments, a positive/negative blend. In this paper, I introduce a facework scale that serves to capture face-enhancing and face-threatening strategies (and combinations thereof). It can thus explain various uses of terms such as nigger : for example, its use in order to slur or negatively frame another (Croom, 2011); its use (by in-group members) to express affection for or approval of another (Smitherman, 2006); and unsuccessful cases of (re-)appropriation (Bianchi, 2014) such that an utterance meant to build camaraderie between S and T ultimately serves to offend T. The facework scale can also explain additional facework moves, such as S's use of strategic facework strategies which afford them some plausibility deniability (Archer, 2011; Leech, 1983). Although paradigmatic slurs are not likely to be (strategically) denied by S, given their overt use in insulting, injuring, threatening the face of, or otherwise imposing a negative identity on T (Croom, 2013: 178), facework which is strategically ambivalent in some way(s) can be an effective means of S manipulating others' views of T without explicitly “doing” impoliteness (Archer, 2011). This work thus contributes to the field of im/politeness research as well as to the growing body of (pragmatic) research focussing on slurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are racial slurs always offensive and are racial stereotypes always negative? How, if at all, are racial slurs and stereotypes different and unequal for members of different races? Questions like these and others about slurs and stereotypes have been the focus of much research and hot debate lately, and in a recent article Embrick and Henricks (2013) aimed to address some of the aforementioned questions by investigating the use of racial slurs and stereotypes in the workplace. Embrick and Henricks (2013) drew upon the empirical data they collected at a baked goods company in the southwestern United States to argue that racial slurs and stereotypes function as symbolic resources that exclude minorities but not whites from opportunities or resources and that racial slurs and stereotypes are necessarily considered as negative or derogatory irrespective of their particular context of use (pp. 197–202). They thus proposed an account of slurs and stereotypes that supports the context-insensitive position of Fitten (1993) and Hedger (2013) yet challenges the context-sensitive position of Kennedy (2002) and Croom (2011). In this article I explicate the account of racial slurs and stereotypes provided by Embrick and Henricks (2013), outline 8 of their main claims, and then critically evaluate these claims by drawing upon recent empirical evidence on racial slurs (both in-group and out-group uses) and stereotypes (for both whites and blacks) to point out both strengths and weaknesses of their analysis. Implications of the present analysis for future work on slurs and stereotypes will also be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grice's cryptic notion of “conventional implicature” has been developed in a number of different ways. This paper deploys the simplest version, Lycan's (1984) notion of “lexical presumption,” and argues that slurs and other pejorative expressions have normal truth-conditional content plus the most obvious extra implicatures. The paper then addresses and rebuts objections to “conventional implicature” accounts that have been made in the literature, particularly those which focus on non-offensive uses of slurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses individual Croatian slurs by which a negative attitude is expressed towards the identities of ethnic and other social groups. The theoretical framework is provided by several theoretical postulates which take slurs into consideration as words with full meaning, whose meaning is paradigmatically offensive despite their actual context, and thus place them in a separate category besides expressive and descriptive words rather them among expressive words alone (Croom), while stressing the importance of the role of the stereotype (Miščević) and considering contexts as aggregates of the ideologies and practices on which negative stereotypes are based (Hom). Taking into consideration the groups who are the target of these slurs and the speakers who use them, the slurs are classified into the following subtypes: racial, ethnic and regional. The negative and stereotypical characteristics which are, by means of idiomatic expressions, attributed to certain groups are divided as follows: speech, appearance, character, occupation, place and religion. The examples reveal that lexemes, when viewed diachronically, can change their semantic features (slurs can originate from either descriptive or expressive words, but can also become general offenses and are as such close to expressive words; on the other hand they can lose their negative characteristics). The analysis of the slurs shows how a model for the typology of slurs should necessarily include not only stereotypical categories and specific features but also the context, regardless of the paradigmatic full meaning of the slurs themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the application of the indexical field (Eckert, 2008) and orders of indexicality (Silverstein, 2003) for the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) term favelado ‘slum-dweller’, which is synonymous to morador de favela ‘slum-dweller’ but has acquired negatively charged indexical values. Building on discussions of the (re)appropriation or reclaiming of slurs and other pejorized terms, such as the Cantonese word tongzhi (Wong, 2005, 2008), gay ( McConnell-Ginet, 2002 ), queer ( McConnell-Ginet, 2002 ), nigger (Jacobs, 2002; Camp, 2013; Croom, 2011; Washington, 2010; inter alia ), this study of favelado builds on Eckert's (2008) indexical field and creates a model of lexical indexicality that explains the simultaneous availability of both pejorative and powerful meanings. The positively-valenced reclaimed meanings are contextually limited and require simultaneous access to pejorative meanings. We propose that movement, or ‘sidestepping’ (Eckert, 2008), within the indexical field fuels movement between pejorative and ameliorated meanings. This paper highlights the importance of accounting for lexical indexical values in sociolinguistic study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of slurs between members of different ethnic groups within the black racial category in the United States—specifically, the second generation of Nigerian ancestry and African Americans, as reported by the second generation of Nigerian ancestry. Studies on inter-group usage of slurs have mostly focused on the use of racial slurs targeting African Americans, the use of racial and ethnic slurs targeting non-black racial/ethnic groups, and the use of sexist slurs targeting people of different gender and sexual orientation. There has been limited analysis of use of slurs between ethnic groups within the black racial category in the United States. My investigation shows that slurs are part of the process of identity formation for the second generation. Also, the use of slurs between these two ethnic groups within the black category provides more evidence for Croom's (2010, 2011, and 2013) point that slurs do not always have to be used in a derogatory manner. It adds to what we know about the nonderogatory use of slurs by showing that a slur can be used as a socialization tool for young in-group members. I show that slurs can be appropriated by the group using the slur to target out-group members and that slurs can also be used within their own group to send a cautionary message to group members based on the derogatory meanings that are infused into the slur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the manifestation and effects of slurs against men and masculinity. In Study 1, we created a taxonomy of slurs against men and masculinity. In Study 2, we established that men may respond with physical aggression when targeted by these slurs. In Study 3, we demonstrated that slurs in different categories of our taxonomy produce varying levels of perceived offensiveness and likelihoods of aggressive responses. Finally, in Study 4, we showed that men's masculine honor beliefs are associated with their perceptions of slurs as offensive and the ratings of their likelihood of responding physically, especially for slurs that directly challenge their masculinity. These findings extend the extant literature that has examined the content of and reactions to slurs and physically aggressive responses to provocation, as well as that which has examined conceptualizations of masculine honor from both cultural and individual difference perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of our paper is to provide the reader with a sort of vademecum on the possibilities and the limits of an experimental approach to the study of slurs and derogatory language. We distinguish between off-line and on-line studies and underline the advantages and constraints of both methodologies. Empirical studies have already contributed to the investigation of slurs, at least as far as off-line experiments are concerned: we argue that on-line techniques might also provide interesting insights, but only to the extent to which one can derive predictions about the processing of slurs from the theories under investigation. We provide the example of two theoretical debates in which an on-line approach may prove useful in assessing various hypotheses – namely the content-based/non content-based dispute and the echoic approach to slurs. In closing we suggest an alternative domain in which experimental research and theoretical investigation on slurs might fruitfully interact: cognitive and affective neuroscience, and more particularly the investigation of how our cognitive system handles negative stimuli. Slurs may be seen as a prototype of aggressive behavior concentrated in a few words: therefore they are well suited for testing the reactions of our brain and peripheral nervous system to verbal aggression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this paper is to propose the Compatibility Condition for multiple expressive elements in Korean, which is highly applicable in other languages. Exploring the behavior of ethnic slurs in the presence of other regular expressive elements, I show the systematicity of how various expressive items interact with one another. For this purpose, looking at Korean is advantageous since it extensively makes use of expressives across lexical categories. In doing so, I try to answer two main questions that haven't been taken seriously before. First, the multiple occurrences of identical expressives are known to be possible, but what about co-occurrences of different expressives with varying attitudes, including the conflicting ones? Do they freely occur within one utterance? If not, what constrains their compatibility condition and the degree of the compatibility? To solve this puzzle, I investigate the dynamic paradigm of multiple expressives. I propose the Compatibility Condition Model (CCM) and the Compatibility Condition Index (CCI), showing how a language like Korean constrains the possible co-occurrences of various types of expressives such as slurs, epithets, anti-honorifics, intensifiers, or mitigators. Second, how strict is the Compatibility Condition of expressives, and what happens if the condition is flouted? I show how in practice people intentionally flout the Compatibility Condition to achieve various pragmatic effects, presenting four interesting cases: (i) the juxtaposition of opposite attitudes with stronger pragmatic effects such as sarcasm, irony, or hyperbole; (ii) the well-known flip-flop of bipolar emotional index; (iii) the code-switching at Honorific-dimension as a strategy of modulating social distance; and (iv) the question of whether Emotion- and Honorific-dimensions operate autonomously. The result supports the notion of multidimensionality (Potts, 2005 et seq.) and furthermore the newfound hybrid nature of Conditional Autonomy , i.e., autonomy with intercommunication amongst expressive dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with offensive anti-Semitic remarks made by celebrities and public figures, which led to scandals that were reported in online newspapers, magazines, and other news websites. The texts investigated were originally written in Hebrew, but they contain a translational component – anti-Semitic slurs translated into Hebrew and marked as direct speech, usually by the use of quotation marks. The paper points out two tendencies that were detected in the Hebrew reportage: explicitation, accentuation, and intensification, on the one hand, and humorous framing – especially when dealing with the world of entertainment – on the other hand. The first tendency, which is apparent in the translations themselves, has been discerned in the rendering of slurs which are “voids,” according to the terminology of translation studies, and in the translation of other slurs as well. It is consistent with what translation studies labels “universals of translation” – phenomena entailed by the very process of inter-lingual transfer. This tendency is also in line with the attraction of some journalistic writing for the sensational. A less universal explanation for the intensification of anti-Semitic slurs is an inclination toward self-victimization on the part of the target culture. The second tendency – humorous framing of the translated utterances – can be interpreted as a means of coping with anti-Semitic slurs; by employing their sense of humor, the writers demonstrate superiority over those who use them. The two tendencies combine (not necessarily in the same reportage) to magnify verbal anti-Semitism, and then defeat it by using humor. Through this case-study, this paper offers several contributions: 1) Discussing slurs from the point of view of translation – which is a contribution to both translation studies and the study of slurs; 2) Applying the concepts of voids, explicitation and intensification, which have been developed in translation studies, to the study of slurs; 3) Investigating slurs in the context of journalism; 4) Pointing out the use of humor as a means to cope with slurs; 5) Addressing the issue of anti-Semitism from a unique perspective, combining translation, slurs, humor and journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]