Abstract
Slurs have become a big topic of discussion both in philosophy and in linguistics. Slurs are usually characterised as pejorative terms, co-extensional with other, neutral, terms referring to ethnic or social groups. However, slurs are not the only ethnic/social words with pejorative senses. Our aim in this paper is to introduce a different kind of pejoratives, which we will call “ethnic/social terms used as insults”, as exemplified in (European) Spanish, though present in many other languages and mostly absent in English. These are ethnic terms like gitano, ‘Romani’, which can have an extensional and neutral use, but also a pejorative meaning building on a negative stereotypical representation of the Romani community.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Consider, for instance, the following naturally-occurring examples:
(i) a. But that's why I'm not a mod [moderator], I'm such a nazi when it comes to keep a forum straight. :oops: https://www.mechspecs.com/threads/ace-of-spades-every-mech.9238/.
b. I cannot thank enough my nazi of a father who ONLY allowed us to have water with meals growing up. Now I love it and don’t have an addiction to soda or juice. https://thehealthypineapple.com/tag/pretzels/.
Thanks to Manuel García-Carpintero for providing the example.
List of abbreviations: 1 = first person, 2 = second person, 3 = third person, eval = evaluative morpheme, fem = feminine, masc = masculine, neg = negation, pl = plural, sg = singular.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
The pre-2014 editions of the RAE (Royal Academy for the Spanish Language) dictionary used to capture this meaning in this way: “trapacero; que estafa u obra con engaño” (‘crook; someone who scams or deceives’). Then, in 2014, after protests from the Romani community, it explained the content of the pejorative meaning of gitano simply by making it a synomym of trapacero (‘crook’) and adding, as metadata, that the meaning is pejorative. Representatives of the Romani community are still fighting against the pejorative meaning of gitano being listed at all.
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.
As a referee points out, there is no fixed subset of negative or positive properties of a cluster associated with a term that would guarantee that these terms will be systematically used as a pejorative or an insult. Take dad (examples provided by the reviewer):
-
(i)
He wears high-waisted trousers and has been putting on weight. He's such a dad! (He has a negative feature of dads).
-
(ii)
She raised all the kids alone, working full time. She was a mom and a dad for them. (I.e., she has the positive features of moms and dads).
-
(iii)
He fathered 7 children, abandoned them, and never paid any childcare. He's not a (real/true) dad. (I.e., he lacks the positive features of dads).
-
(i)
The English equivalent of the N1 of an N2 construction is best with a demonstrative or possessive pronoun modifying N1, unlike the Spanish.
And leaving aside specificational and equative copular constructions. On this, see Higgins (1979), Partee (1986), Heycock (1994), Moro (1997) and Mikkelsen (2005), a.m.o. The cases we deal with are predicational, whereby the predicate is the noun phrase following the copula and the subject is another noun phrase which is the argument of the predicate.
Emphatic un also occurs beyond copular constructions, in examples such as (i), from Rigau (1999: p. 324). In these contexts, the indefinite is unacceptable unless a modifier is added that allows for the evaluative interpretation of the noun.
(i)
a.
Tengo
unmiedo
*(que me muero).
have.1sg
a.masc fear
that me die.1sg
‘I am (terribly) scared.’
b.
Tiene
unos hijos
*(que son insoportables).
has.3sg
a.masc.pl
that are.3pl unbearable.pl
‘S/he has (unbearable) children.’
We have studied the most usual—the conventional—case where the evaluative character of gitano is negative. However, it can also have a positive meaning. If a Romani mother tells her son (i), she may be reminding him to be proud of what he is—and to act accordingly. In such a case, she will be conveying the positive ideal that Romani people may have of themselves (which can be shared by other, non-Romani, speakers). It will be a reminder of the positive features that he has by virtue of being a Romani, for instance, being a free spirit loyal to the community.
(i)
recuerda:
eres
un
gitan-o.
remember
are.2sg
a.masc
Romani-masc
‘Remember: you are a Romani.’
Gitano here is interpreted in a way similar to a family name. This is typically used with last names, as illustrated in (ii), where Lannister is a last name in the fictional Game of Thrones. Lannister is presumed to evoke positive properties that have been attached to the lineage since its beginning.
(ii) Recuerda siempre que eres un Lannister.
‘Always remember you are a Lannister.’
On this idea, see also footnote 12. Note, however, that ESTIs are unlike other evaluative predicates in that their relation with the negative stereotype is both much more stable and salient than the relation between e.g., artist and its stereotype (positive or negative). On the other hand, all ethnic terms can express a positive meaning, especially within—or at least arising from—the ethnic community (the same can be said about terms of professions). What is peculiar concerning ESTIs is that their associated negative stereotype is very widespread outside the ethnic community, to the extent that the term has become a way to denote the stereotype (i.e., the cluster of properties that form such a stereotype). The praising use of gitano or any other ethnic or social terms that are recurrently used as insults in auténtico environments requires much more context, which indicates that such uses may be the effect of pragmatics. Out of the blue, auténtico gitano means robber, liar, etc. It is a default reading that can also have another, positive, reading. But audiences would not get this other reading unless the reading is put in the adequate context.
As for the neutral use, a doorperson in Spain is someone who manages the main entrance of an apartment building.
There are well-known non-pejorative uses of slurs, for instance after appropriation or linguistic reclamation (Brontsema 2004; Anderson and Lepore 2013; Ritchie 2017; Anderson 2018, a.o.). For the time being we will set such uses aside, as they are not relevant to the discussion concerning differences between ESTIs and slur-words at this point.
The word stereotype is used in several different ways in the literature. Here we will use it to refer to a categorization device that has a prototypical structure (basically: features and weighs), but that, unlike a prototype, is not an abstraction from encountered exemplars. Rather, a stereotype is typically based on social prejudices. For stereotype as sets of beliefs, we will use stereotypical beliefs.
Although see, e.g., Martin (2016) on an account where projection and addressing the QUD are explicitly separate.
We will revisit theories of slurs in Sect. 3.3.
The fact that in principle gitano in (26) can convey also a positive meaning (say, Manuel is not a free spirit loyal to the community) does not tell against this analysis of how ESTIs work when they are used as insults (i.e., when the meaning selected is the negative stereotype). If we are right, and the negative stereotype is one of the conventional meanings of gitano, what we are describing is how such meaning is factored out in terms of AI and NAI content. However, let us insist that such a positive meaning of un gitano is rare and requires a lot of context. As we have said before, such a use of un gitano is akin to phrases such as un Lannister, such that Manuel no es un gitano would be relevantly similar to Tyron no es un Lannister (‘Tyron is not a Lannister’), meaning “Tyron does not share the values that the Lannisters are supposed to have”. We even have doubts about whether the sentence by itself, without prosodic emphasis or the addition of auténtico, would success in conveying the positive meaning. Thanks to a referee for reminding us at this point that (26) could have a different reading.
Several authors (e.g. Williamson 2009; Marques and García-Carpintero 2020) have rightly objected to this simple expressivist view: if the NAI content of a slur is just an expression of a subjective attitude, the audience should have no problem in accepting the use of the slur. However, this is not how we, as the audience, react to the use of a slur. Marques and García-Carpintero (2020) argue that the NAI content of slurs has a normative component: “one must derogate group F”. We are not convinced that such normative content has to also include reference to stereotypical features of the target group, as Marques and García-Carpintero imply. In any case, for the purpose of this paper, it does not matter much that the thin attitudinal view is not correct. The contrast between slurs and ESTIs can be drawn also if the NAI content of slurs is normative (see below).
In an account such as Hom’s (2008), this point would have to be expressed differently. But the difference would persist under a different description of the phenomenon.
References
Anderson, L. (2018). Calling, addressing, and appropriation. In D. Sosa (Ed.), Bad words (pp. 6–28). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Anderson, L., & Lepore, E. (2013). Slurring words. Nous, 47(1), 25–48.
Beaver, D., Simons, M., Roberts, C., & Tonhauser, J. (2017). Questions under discussion: Where information structure meets projective content. Annual Review of Linguistics, 3, 265–284.
Bolinger, D. (1972). Degree words. The Hague: Mouton.
Bolinger, R. J. (2017). The pragmatics of slurs. Noûs, 51(3), 439–462.
Bosque, I. (1993). Sobre las diferencias entre los adjetivos relacionales y los calificativos. Revista Argentina de Lingüística, 9, 9–48.
Bosque, I. (1996). Por qué determinados sustantivos no son sustantivos determinados. Repaso y balance. In I. Bosque (Ed.), El sustantivo sin determinación. La ausencia de determinante en la lengua española (pp. 13–119). Madrid: Visor Libros.
Bosque, I. (1999). El nombre común. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Vol. I, pp. 3–76). Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
Brontsema, R. (2004). A queer revolution: Reconceptualizing the debate over linguistic reclamation. Colorado Research in Linguistics, 17(1), 1–17.
Burnett, H. (2019). Signalling games, sociolinguistic variation and the construction of style. Linguistics and Philosophy, 42, 419–450.
Camp, E. (2013). Slurring perspectives. Analytic Philosophy, 54, 330–349.
Camp, E. (2016). A dual act analysis of slurs. In D. Sosa (Ed.), Bad words (pp. 29–59). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
de Vries, H. (2010). Evaluative degree modification of adjectives and nouns. MA Thesis, Universiteit Utrecht.
del Pinal, G., & Reuter, K. (2016). Dual character concepts in social cognition: Commitments and the normative dimension of conceptual representation. Cognitive Science, 41, 1–25.
di Tullio, A., & Suñer Gratacós, A. (2008). La evolución de un como artículo enfático ante nombres de cualidad en función de atributo. In C. Company, & J. G. Moreno de Alba (Eds.), Actas del VII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española (pp. 499–510). Madrid: Arco Libros.
Doetjes, J., & Rooryck, J. (2003). Generalizing over qualitative and quantitative constructions. In M. Coene & Y. D’hulst (Eds.), From NP to DP (pp. 277–296). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4), 453–476.
Espinal, M. T. (2013). Bare nominals, bare predicates. Properties and related types. In J. Kabatek & A. Wall (Eds.), New perspectives on bare noun phrases in romance and beyond (pp. 63–94). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fernández LM (1983) El comportamiento de un con sustantivos y adjetivos en función de predicado nominal: sobre el llamado un enfático. In Serta Philologica: F. Lázaro Carreter: Natalem Diem Sexagesimum Celebranti Dicata (pp. 195–208). Madrid: Cátedra.
Fernández Leborans, M. J. (1999). La predicación: las oraciones copulativas. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (pp. 2357–2460). Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
Frege, G. (1897/1979). Logic. In H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, & F. Kaulbach (Eds.), Posthumous writings (pp. 126–151). Oxford: Blackwell.
Geist, L. (2019). Predication over aspects of human individuals. Linguistics, 57(6), 1305–1336.
Gutiérrez-Rexach, J. (2010). Varieties of indefinites in Spanish. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4(8), 680–693.
Gutzmann, D. (2015). Use-conditional meaning: Studies in multidimensional semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gutzmann, D., & McCready, E. (2016). Quantification with pejoratives. In R. Finkbeiner, J. Meibauer, & H. Wiese (Eds.), Pejoration (pp. 75–101). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hernanz, M. L. (2001). ¡En bonito lío me he metido! Notas sobre la afectividad en español. Moenia. Revista Lucense de Lingüística y Literatura, 7, 93–109.
Heycock, C. (1994). Layers of predication. The non-lexical syntax of clauses. New York: Garland.
Higgins, F. R. (1979). The pseudo-cleft construction in English. New York: Garland.
Hom, C. (2008). The semantics of racial epithets. Journal of Philosophy, 105, 416–440.
Jeshion, R. (2013). Slurs and stereotypes. Analytic Philosophy, 54, 314–329.
Jeunot, D. (1983). ‘Il est médecin’ (pourquoi pas?). In S. Fisher & J. J. Franckel (Eds.), Linguistique, énonciation. Aspects et détermination (pp. 81–95). Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Knobe, J., Prasada, S., & Newman, G. (2013). Dual character concepts and the normative dimension of conceptual representation. Cognition, 127, 242–257.
Korzen, I. (1982). Perché ‘Mario é medico’ ma non ‘*Mario é mascalzone?’. Studi di grammatica italiana, 11, 137–178.
Marques, T., & García-Carpintero, M. (2020). Really expressive presuppositions and how to block them. Grazer Philosophische Studien, 97, 138–158.
Martin, S. (2016). Supplement update. Semantics and Pragmatics, 9, 1–61.
Masià, M. (2017). Adverbial adjectives and nominal scalarity. Ph.D. Thesis. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Masià, M. (2018). Extreme nouns and maximizers. In I. Sauerland, & S. Solt (Eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, ZASPiL 61 (Vol. 2, pp. 143–161). Berlin: ZAS.
Masià, M. (2019). A typology of evaluative nouns. In I. Feldhausen, M. Elsig, I. Kuchenbrandt, & M. Neuhaus (Eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2016. Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ Frankfurt 2016 (pp. 296–312). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Matushansky, O. (2002). A beauty of a construction. In L. Mikkelsen & C. Potts (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 264–77). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
McCready, E. (2010). Varieties of conventional implicature. Semantics and Pragmatics, 3(8), 1–57.
Mikkelsen, L. (2005). Copular clauses. Specification, predication and equation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Milner, J. (1978). De la syntaxe a l’interprétation: quantités, insultes, exclamations. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Moro, A. (1997). The raising of predicates. Predicative noun phrases and the theory of clause structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morzycki, M. (2009). Degree modification of gradable nouns: Size adjectives and adnominal degree morphemes. Natural Language Semantics, 17(2), 175–203.
Munaro, N. (2006). Verbless exclamatives across romance: Standard expectations and tentative evaluations. University of Venice working papers in linguistics, 16, 185–209.
Nouwen, R. (2011). Degree modifiers and monotonicity. In P. Égré & N. Klinedinst (Eds.), Vagueness and language use (pp. 146–164). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nunberg, G. (2017). The social life of slurs. In D. Fogel, D. Harris, & M. Moss (Eds.), New work on speech acts (pp. 237–295). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Partee, B. (1986). Ambiguous pseudoclefts with unambiguous be. In S. Berman, J. Choe, & J. McDonough (Eds.), Proceedings of the North Eastern linguistic society (Vol. 16, pp. 354–366). Amherst, MA: GLSA.
Pollock, J. Y. (1983). Sur quelques propriétés des phrases copulatives en français. Langue française, 58, 89–125.
Portolés, J. (1993). Atributos con un enfático. Revue Romane, 28(2), 218–236.
Portolés, J. (1994). La metáfora y la lingüística: los atributos metafóricos con un enfático. In V. Demonte (Ed.), Gramática del español (pp. 531–556). Colegio de México: México.
Potts, C. (2005). The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Potts, C. (2007). The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics, 33(2), 165–197.
Reuter, K. (2019). Dual-character concepts. Philosophy Compass, 14(1), e12557.
Rigau, G. (1999). La estructura del sintagma nominal: Los modificadores del nombre. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (pp. 311–362). Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
Ritchie, K. (2017). Social identity, indexicality, and the appropriation of slurs. Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 17(2), 155–180.
Ruwet, N. (1982). Grammaire des insultes et autres études. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Schumacher, P. B. (2013). When combinatorial processing results in reconceptualization: Towards a new approach of compositionality. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 677.
Simons, M., Tonhauser, J., Beaver, D., & Roberts, C. (2010). What projects and why. In N. LI & D. Lutz (Eds.), Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 20) (pp. 309–327). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.
Suñer Gratacós, A. (1990). La predicación secundaria en español. Ph.D. Thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Suñer Gratacós, A. (1999). La aposición y otras relaciones de predicación en el sintagma nominal. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (pp. 523–564). Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
Tirrell, L. (1999). Derogatory terms: Racism, sexism, and the inferential role theory of meaning. In C. Hendricks & K. Oliver (Eds.), Language and liberation: Feminism, philosophy, and language (pp. 41–80). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Tonhauser, J., Beaver, D., Roberts, C., & Simons, M. (2013). Toward a taxonomy of projective content. Language, 89(1), 66–109.
Vicente, A. (2018). Polysemy and word meaning: An account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words. Philosophical Studies, 175, 947–968.
Villaba, X., & Bartra-Kaufmann, A. (2010). Predicate focus fronting in the Spanish Determiner Phrase. Lingua, 120(4), 819–849.
Vinet, M. T. (1991). French non-verbal exclamative constructions. Probus, 3(1), 77–100.
Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the limits of philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Williamson, T. (2009). Reference, inference and the semantics of pejoratives. In J. Almog & P. Leonardi (Eds.), The philosophy of David Kaplan (pp. 137–158). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
Thanks for comments and suggestions to Manuel García-Carpintero, Violeta Demonte, Andrea Beltrama, Heather Burnett, audiences at the Sociolinguistic, Psycholinguistic and Formal Perspectives on Meaning Workshop and the 19th Szklarska Poreba Workshop, as well as to two anonymous referees of this journal. We are of course responsible for any remaining errors. Special thanks are due to Dan Zeman, who brought the “tigan” issue to us. This research has been partially supported by Projects VASTRUD (PGC2018-096870-B-I00) and PROLE (PGC2018-093464-B-I00), and predoctoral Grant BES-2016-076783, funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MiCIU)/Spanish Research Agency (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER, UE), by the IT1396-19 Research Group (Basque Government), and GIU18/221 (University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
The order of authors is alphabetical.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Castroviejo, E., Fraser, K. & Vicente, A. More on pejorative language: insults that go beyond their extension. Synthese 198, 9139–9164 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02624-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02624-0