Slurs: At-issueness and Semantic Normativity

Abstract

In the first part of the article, we present the main approaches to analyze slurs’ content and we investigate the interaction between an assertion containing a slur and a denial (‘It’s not true that P’ / P is false’) showing to what extent a “neutral counterpart account” works better than a “dual account”. Additionally, the analysis offers the opportunity to discuss the usefulness of the notion of “at-issueness” for a debate on the lexical semantics of slurs. In the second part, we use our apparatus to analyze a real case of non-standard use of ‘frocio’ (‘faggot’). Our conclusion is that even if a family resemblance conception of category membership could account for these uses, it cannot account for the related semantic normativity problem.

Keywords

• ambiguity
• at-issueness
• lexical semantics
• semantic normativity