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.
Two rival accounts of irony claim, respectively, that pretence and echo are independently sufficient to explain central cases. After highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of these accounts, I argue that an account in which both pretence and echo play an essential role better explains these cases and serves to explain peripheral cases as well. I distinguish between “weak” and “strong” hybrid theories, and advocate an “integrated strong hybrid” account in which elements of both pretence and echo are seen as complementary in a unified mechanism. I argue that the allegedly mutually exclusive elements of pretence and echo are in fact complementary aspects enriching a core-structure as follows: by pretending to have a perspective/thought F, an ironic speaker U echoes a perspective/thought G. F is merely pretended, perhaps caricaturised or exaggerated, while G is real/possible.
Central to modern semantics is Frege's distinction between force and sense. According to that distinction the content of an illocutionary act-a self-standing utterance of a sentence S-can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S's linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S's illocutionary force. Illocutionary forces are usually analysed as communicative intentions with which S is uttered. If the force is assertoric, then the speaker intends that her audience believe P, or some such condition. If the force is commissive-that characteristic of orders and requests-the speaker intends that the audience see to it that it is true. And so on.The force/sense distinction-designate it Force/Sense-is associated with another thesis. This is the truth-conditional embedding principle: TC-Embedding:If a sentence S is embedded in a compound sentence (…S…), then the speech act performed with S is a propositional act: an act that involves uttering S with a propositional (true/false-assessable) content and no other content.Force/Sense implies TC-Embedding, given plausible background assumptions and the fact that forces don't seem to embed.Despite their venerated status, we dispute both Force/Sense and TC-Embedding. We think linguistic phenomena across the board show both are wrong. However, in this paper, we restrict ourselves to figurative speech and irony in particular. We argue that irony embeds in compound sentences. This fact seriously challenges TC-Embedding and thus Force/Sense.We examine a range of responses, but the overall picture is a negative one. Theorists need to go back to the drawing board about the nature of illocutionary acts.1. Consider irony. Suppose Max has a very low opinion of George's talents. In one of his sarcastic outbursts, Max utters: 2 (1) George is a real genius, Clearly, Max is expressing a derisory attitude about anyone thinking George is a genius, and communicating that the opposite holds regarding George. We now generalize. Let [Invert-P] denote the state of affairs that is the opposite of the state of affairs expressed by a sentence P.In irony the speaker U utters a sentence S, and, amongst other things does the following:Irony: (i) Expresses ridicule of a person who believes that P, for some contextually given P.(ii) Expresses belief that the [Invert-P] is the case.Typically, though not always, the content P is the literal said-content of S. Max's utterance of (1) is a case of this. However, if the irony involves questions, orders, and so forth it won't be the case. We don't consider those instances here.Is irony a pragmatic phenomenon-something in the realm of force and conversational practice-or a semantic phenomenon-something to do with truthconditions? Answering this question must take into account the following fact: irony embeds.
Compound figures are a rich, and under-explored area for tackling fundamental issues in philosophy of language. This paper explores new ideas about how to explain some features of such figures. We start with an observation from Stern (2000) that in ironic-metaphor, metaphor is logically prior to irony in the structure of what is communicated. Call this thesis Logical-MPT. We argue that a speech-actbased explanation of Logical-MPT is to be preferred to a content-based explanation.To create this explanation we draw on Barker's (2004) expressivist speech-act theory, in which speech-acts build on other speech-acts to achieve the desired communicative effects. In particular, we show how Barker's general ideas explain metaphor as an assertive-act, and irony as a ridiculing-act. We use Barker's notion of proto-illocutionary-acts to show how metaphorical-acts and ironic-acts can build one on the other. Finally, we show that while an ironic-act can build on a metaphorical-act, a metaphorical-act cannot build on an ironic-act. This restriction on how they can be composed establishes Logical-MPT via a different route.
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