35.3441, FYI: STAL Seminar, DECEMBER 9, 14.30 Central European Time: Elin McCready & Christopher Davis, "The Invocational Impact of Slurs"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-3441. Thu Dec 05 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.3441, FYI: STAL Seminar, DECEMBER 9, 14.30 Central European Time: Elin McCready & Christopher Davis, "The Invocational Impact of Slurs"

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Date: 04-Dec-2024
From: Dan Zeman [danczeman at gmail.com]
Subject: STAL Seminar, DECEMBER 9, 14.30 Central European Time: Elin McCready & Christopher Davis, "The Invocational Impact of Slurs"


The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network
(https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home) invites you to a talk
by Elin McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University) and Christopher Davis
(University of the Ryukyus) entitled "The Invocational Impact of
Slurs". The talk will take place online on DECEMBER 9, 14:30-16:00
Central European Time (CET) and is part of the of STAL network seminar
series (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you
want to participate, please write to stalnetwork at gmail.com for the
Zoom link. Below you can find the abstract.

All welcome!


ABSTRACT:
Rappaport (2019) articulates three distinct components that together
constitute the meaning profile of slur terms: 1. descriptive: Slurs
denote particular groups of people; 2. evaluative: Slurs communicate
or signal the speaker’s negative attitudes towards the group so
denoted; 3. affective: Slurs are capable of “expressing powerful
emotions and causing a strong emotional response in hearers”. We build
on this three-component model of slur meanings, arguing that the
slur’s descriptive content is encoded in its at-issue semantic
denotation. The evaluative component has received the bulk of
attention in both the linguistic and philosophical literature. It is
this component that drives the intuition that use of a slur term
signals some kind of negative sentiment on the part of the speaker
toward the group picked out by the term. We argue for a
non-conventionalist account of this meaning component, in which the
evaluative component is derived through a particular kind of
inference, as argued by Nunberg (2018), Pullum (2018), and Rappaport
(2019). We argue further that the mechanism underlying this inference
is of a kind with (at least some instances of) indexical meaning as
articulated in third-wave sociolinguistics (Eckert, 2008, 2018). Our
primary aim in this talk is to better understand Rappaport’s affective
component, and to get clarity about how this component relates to the
other two. In Rappaport’s formulation, this component includes (i) the
expression of powerful emotions, and (ii) the elicitation of powerful
emotions. It is the second subcomponent we focus attention on here:
how do slur terms come by their ability to cause distress to those who
perceive them? We concur with Rappaport’s view that the impact of a
slur term cannot be fully derived from its evaluative component,
contra e.g. Nunberg (2018) and Pullum (2018). We will argue instead
that a slur’s impact derives from what we term invocational meaning,
whose characteristic property is to unilaterally alter the discourse
context by bringing to contextual and cognitive prominence a
pre-existing but possibly backgrounded complex, achieved by mere
mention (or more strictly speaking, mere perception) of the invoking
term itself. Time permitting, we will discuss extensions of this model
to non-slur terms as well.

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Philosophy of Language
                     Pragmatics
                     Semantics




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