Dan Zeman: "A Polysemy View of Slurs and of Other Evaluative Expressions"

Organized by the Department of Analytic Philosophy of the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Science

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Dan Zeman: "A Polysemy View of Slurs and of Other Evaluative Expressions"

Abstract
Slurs (expressions like "fag", "nerd", "commie", the  n-word etc.) have attracted a lot of attention in contemporary  philosophy of language and linguistics, due to their capacity to  derogate and offend their targets. They also pose a challenge to  traditional views of meaning, in that they exhibit a double aspect: on  one hand, the sentences in which they figure make descriptive claims  about the group membership of their targets; on the other, they convey a  negative attitude or evaluation of their targets based on said group  membership. Interestingly, alongside their derogatory use, slurs also  have a plethora of non-derogatory uses: appropriated, referential,  identificatory etc., in which slurs are used either positively or  neutrally. In this talk, I present the barebones of a research programme  that aims to account for all these uses by construing slurs as  polysemous. Polysemy has been dealt with preponderantly in lexical  semantics, and so I will discuss several arguments for each of the two  main views in that branch of semantics - rich-lexicon and thin-lexicon  theories, arguing that the former is a better fit for slurs. Finally, I  investigate whether the same approach can be transferred to other  evaluative expressions that have positive/neutral uses: thick terms like  "lewd", "balanced"; dual-character expressions like "mother",  "teacher"; evaluatives like "tasty", "beautiful", "(morally) good"; and  expressives like "jerk", "damn". I argue that it can, thus raising the  prospect of a unified, economical approach to the entire  evaluative sphere.