Slurs across Syntactic Realizations. Experimental Evidence on Predicative vs. Ad-nominal Uses of Slurs

Bianca Cepollaro (Institut Jean Nicod, Scuola Normale Superiore), Filippo Domaneschi (Universität Konstanz), Isidora Stojanovic (Institut Jean Nicod, Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home) invites you to a talk by Bianca Cepollaro (University Vita-Salute San Raffaele), Filippo Domaneschi (University of Genoa) and Isidora Stojanovic (Pompeu Fabra University/Institut Jean Nicod-CNRS) entitled "Slurs across Syntactic Realizations. Experimental Evidence on Predicative vs. Ad-nominal Uses of Slurs". The talk will take place online on SEPTEMBER 23, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time (CET), and is part of the of STAL Seminar series (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to participate, please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link. Below you can find the abstract.

All welcome!

ABSTRACT

The research on slurs has been largely striving to understand how slurs encode their pejorative meaning – whether via truth-conditional meaning, or conventional implicature, or presupposition, or otherwise. Less attention has been paid to the question of what kind of pejorative content slurs express or convey. It is the latter question that we undertake in the present talk, and we do so by means of an experimental study conducted over slurring terms in Italian, in line with our earlier studies on pejoratives in Italian (“When is it ok to call someone a jerk? An experimental investigation of expressives”, Synthese 2020, and “Literally ‘a jerk’: an experimental investigation of expressives in predicative position”, Language and Cognition, forthcoming). We explore three options: (1) pejorative content is agent-oriented, that is, reflects the negative attitudes of some salient agent, typically the speaker; (2) pejorative content is target-oriented, that is, brings to salience the negative properties of the person(s) referred to with the slur; (3) pejorative content is intersubjective, that is, reflects the negative attitudes of not only the agent but further conversational participants, or even a larger linguistic community. Crucially, we look at slurs both in predicative position (X is a -slur-) and adnominal position (That -slur- X is Y). Our results show that the agent-oriented option is the preferred one for adnominal uses, while the target-oriented option, for predicative uses: this suggests that the pejorative content encoded by slurs is not uniform but varies along a syntactic dimension.