The Semantics of Racial Epithets

Varieties of conventional implicature

“…18 It is still debatable whether the precise content I have proposed (following Richard) is right. Hom (2008) gives an interesting analysis in which pejorative content is not expressive at all, but instead is a social construct varying across speaker groups. I will not argue in detail against this proposal here -I am sympathetic to the notion of social construction of meaning, at least in these sorts of cases -but I doubt that all the content of pejoratives is truth-conditional.…”

“…Hom (2008), faced with a similar decision, makes use of Chink, which is perhaps fairly similar in quality.…”

Slurs, roles and power

“…In some works (e.g. Hom 2008Hom , 2012) the focus in describing variability is on the derogative content of the word. Hom distinguishes derogation and offence as follows: ''offence is a psychological result on the part of the discourse participants, and is a function of their beliefs and values … derogation is an objective feature of the semantic contents of pejorative terms'' (Hom 2012: 397).…”

“…9 Aside from Anderson and Lepore (2013a), most authors provide an account of the meaning of slur words. Some treat meaning as propositional content-whether as part of truth-conditional semantics (Hom 2008) or non-truth-conditional semantics (Saka 2007). Other treatments are as editorial comment (Bach forthcoming), presupposition (Schlenker 2007), and conventional implicature (Williamson 2009;Whiting 2013;Lycan 2015).…”

“…Starting with semantic theories, we take Hom (2008) as representative. Take VT1, there are two types of variation falling within VT1: intra-group and inter-group.…”