The Invocational Impact of Slurs

Elin McCready, Christopher Davis

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 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:

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.