Abstract
For a predicate expression F contained in a sentence S (‘x is F’) to count as an insult, it should be used in a situation having a number of contextual elements. There should be an audience to whom the utterance of S is addressed. There should be a target of the insult, an individual who the speaker wishes to be shunned, excluded from certain, more or less salient, forms of social cooperation. The purpose of the utterance of S is to persuade the audience, by appeal to their emotions, to shun the target. Slurs have the canonical occasions of use structurally identical to the occasions of insults.
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- 1.
See [4].
- 2.
Terminological note: in [5] the class of pejoratives consists of swear words, insults, and slurs. Here I ignore swear words completely. I hope it should become clear by the end of this essay why their analysis should differ in principle from the analysis of the other two kinds of expressions. The use of pejoratives, in the present terminology, is normally taken as being offensive against someone, a quality shared by ‘insults’ and ‘slurs’. This is in line with the nominal definition in [6], where, rather oddly, the author still includes swear words under the same heading. For an alternative classification of pejoratives and slurs see [7].
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
See [2].
- 6.
See [3].
- 7.
See [9].
- 8.
However, I do not endorse the general theory of slurs in [1].
- 9.
Another brick in the argument would be the observation that some slurs fail to offend in indirect speech or under negation. Examples should include ‘junkie’, ‘doper’, ‘sot’. These are all unquestionably slurs, e.g., easily meeting the conditions of Jeshion’s semantics in [8]. Hence it is a particular property of some slurs that makes them behave in a strange way in embedded constructions.
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Berkovski, Y.S. (2017). A Contextualist Analysis of Insults. In: Brézillon, P., Turner, R., Penco, C. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10257. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_53
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_53
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