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Slurs and antipresuppositions

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Abstract

It has been observed (Heim in Semantik: Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, 487–535, 1991) that when there is competition between alternative sentences with different presuppositional strength, use of the weaker alternative triggers an inference, sometimes called an antipresupposition, to the effect that the presupposition of the stronger alternative is not satisfied. Furthermore, it has been argued that in order to account for antipresuppositions, it is necessary to postulate an independent pragmatic principle called Maximize Presupposition!, which states that the sentence with the stronger presupposition should be preferred whenever its presupposition is satisfied. In parallel, presuppositional theories of slurs (Cepollaro, PhD thesis. https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01508856/document, 2017; Cepollaro and Stojanovic in Grazer Philosophische Studien 93(3): 458–488, 2016; Schlenker in Theoretical Linguistics 33(2): 237–245. https://doi.org/10.1515/TL.2007.017, 2007) maintain that while these expressions encode the same truth-conditional content as their neutral counterparts, they trigger a presupposition that accounts for their derogatory potential. In this article, I argue that presuppositional theories of slurs together with Maximize Presupposition! predict that the use of a neutral counterpart triggers an antipresupposition to the effect that the presupposition of the corresponding slur is not satisfied. As a result, this view incorrectly predicts (i) that it is infelicitous to use the neutral counterpart in contexts where the slur’s presupposition is satisfied, and (ii) that felicitous use of the neutral counterpart in a context that is unspecific w.r.t. the pejorative presupposition typically triggers the inference that the presupposition of the corresponding slur is not satisfied.

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Notes

  1. ‘Sudaca’ is a derogatory term used in Spain to refer to South Americans.

  2. Hence, (1) conveys indirectly either that Antonio is despicable or at least that the speaker believes that Antonio is despicable.

  3. I use ‘semantic’ in this context in a broad sense that includes any conventional component of meaning.

  4. Both the need for an independent principle like Maximize Presupposition! and the status of antipresuppositions as pragmatic inferences have been called into question in the literature. I discuss these matters in detail in Sect. 4.

  5. It should be noted that although antipresuppositions emerge from comparison between sentences with different presuppositions, they are not presuppositions themselves.

  6. Maximize Presupposition! has also been put to work in Sauerland et al.’s (2005) account of the plural, Percus’s (2006) work on gender, and Schlenker’s (2005) discussion of person and the subjunctive mood, among others.

  7. A parallel derivation can be constructed for (4).

  8. The way it is defined here, Maximize Presupposition! only ‘sees’ global presuppositions. Percus (2006) shows that this definition faces some problems. As a solution, he proposes to make Maximize Presupposition! sensitive to the presence of specific lexical items. Singh (2011) criticizes Percus’ account and puts forward a revised version of the principle that checks presuppositions locally. Schlenker follows Singh and revises this initial formulation in order to accommodate local contexts. However, since the local/global distinction is not relevant for the examples discussed below, and in order to avoid unnecessary complications, I will work with the global definition.

  9. Following Schlenker (2012, p. 393), I assume a view of presuppositions in which the semantic value of a sentence is undefined when some of its presuppositions are not satisfied.

  10. Here, ‘true\(^{\{w\}}\)’ is to be understood as true relative to the context set {w}.

  11. Here, ‘truec’ is to be understood as true relative to the context set C.

  12. It is worth emphasizing that from this perspective Maximize Presupposition! is a pragmatic principle. As such it is thought to govern conversation as an overridable default; that is, speakers may deviate from Maximize Presupposition! for a number of reasons, the most obvious one being lack of cooperativity. In Sect. 5, I consider two reasons that may systematically deter speakers from adjusting their speech acts to Maximize Presupposition! in contexts where use of a slur is a possibility, namely the taboo nature of slurs and the fact that using a slur may come at a social cost.

  13. An agent is an authority with respect to a presupposition p when her uttering a sentence presupposing p would cause the addressee to accommodate and believe p. This condition is independently motivated in order to take care of cases where the presupposition becomes common belief after the utterance.

  14. This condition aims to account for the fact that crucial pieces of information, e.g. the answer to an explicit question under discussion, cannot be conveyed by means of presuppositions (Chemla 2008, p. 148):

    1. (1)
      1. a.

        Is the coffee machine working today?

      2. b.

        No, John broke it.

      3. c.

        #No, it was John who broke it.

    The problem with (1c), according to Chemla, is that this presupposition is accommodated once the utterance has already achieved its illocutionary purpose (answering the question). Also note that ‘crucial’ is not equivalent in this context to ‘relevant’, for something might be relevant without being crucial:

    1. (2)
      1. a.

        Did Pedro break the coffee machine?

      2. b.

        No, it was John who broke it.

    Arguably, the presupposition of (2b), Someone broke the coffee machine, is relevant, but it is not crucial, for it does not provide the answer to the primary question under discussion in the context. As expected, the sentence is not infelicitous.

  15. This is the so-called ‘competence assumption’, discussed by van Rooij and Schulz (2004) and Sauerland (2004) in relation to scalar implicatures.

  16. Incidentally, note that there seems to be a difference between primary and secondary implicatures, on the one hand, and primary and secondary antipresuppositions, on the other. According to Sauerland (2004, p. 112), in open contexts, primary implicatures are more robust than secondary ones:

    1. (i)
      1. a.

        #They played many of Beethoven’s symphonies, and definitely all.

      2. b.

        They played many of Beethoven’s symphonies, and possibly all.

    (i.b) shows that it is possible to cancel the secondary implicature. However, contradicting the primary implicature, as in (i.a), results in infelicity. By contrast, both primary and secondary antipresuppositions are concealable in open contexts:

    1. (ii)
      1. a.

        John interviewed a father of the victim, and it is definitely the only one she has.

      2. b.

        John interviewed a father of the victim, possibly the only one she has.

  17. They extend their view to what philosophers call ‘thick terms’ (terms with both descriptive and evaluative content) like ‘generous’, ‘lewd’, etc., but I will not discuss these expressions in this article.

  18. Cf. Stalnaker (2002) and von Fintel (2008). This is particularly important. I will discuss it in more detail in the next section.

  19. I will make use of Schlenker’s rendition of pejorative presuppositions in the exposition, but as far as I can see, the point also holds for Cepollaro and Stojanovic’s view.

  20. As an anonymous reviewer suggests, there may be alternative ways of glossing the presuppositions associated with slurs that would avoid these problems (while accounting for the rest of the relevant data about slurs). Whether such an alternative view exists remains to be seen, but in any case I have identified an important tension within presuppositional views (one that is not so easily solved) and, at the very least, I have shown that two concrete presuppositional views face a serious problem.

  21. An analogous situation could be imagined for example (21).

  22. The defender of presuppositional theories may point to some general feature about slurs that suspends the inference in every (or almost every) context. I will address this issue in detail in Sect. 5.

  23. To be sure, that is not Cepollaro’s own view, but the case might be interpreted in this way. As Cepollaro suggests, such cases may be accounted for by a mechanism like the one advocated by Bolinger (2017), i.e. as a pragmatic by-product of the flouting of co-occurring expectations rooted in lexical contrastive preferences.

  24. Thanks to Andrés Saab and Matías Verdecchia for suggesting this line of response.

  25. The term ‘puta’ also has reclaimed uses, which I do not discuss here.

  26. Mariela Rubin (p.c.) suggests another two examples in Spanish: ‘ciruja’(‘bum’)/‘indigente’(‘destitute’, ‘indigent’)/‘persona en situación de calle’(‘person who lives in the street’) and ‘indio’(‘indian’)/‘indígena’, ‘aborigen’(‘indigenous’, ‘aboriginal’)/ ‘habitante originario’(‘native’).

  27. Not all presuppositional theories assume this (cf. Karttunen and Peters 1979). An alternative is to assume, with Hawkins (1991), a Russellian view of definite descriptions according to which the uniqueness condition is part of the asserted content.

  28. There are additional reasons for differentiating scalar implicatures from antipresuppositions. We have already seen one argument to differentiate them (see fn. 16 above): primary antipresuppositions are easier to cancel than primary scalar implicatures. Sauerland (2008) also points out that antipresuppositions behave differently than scalar implicatures in downward entailing environments:

    1. (i)

      Context: The victim has only one father. #John did not interview a father of the victim.

    1. (ii)

      Context: Every teacher assigned the same grade to all her students. Every teacher who assigned some of her students an A will get a pay rise.

      1. a.

        ⇏ ¬(Every teacher who assigned all her students an A will get a pay rise)

  29. I adapted Schlenker’s remarks in a way that I believe is faithful to his argument. These are his words:

    We assume for the moment that if a sentence S transmits to the addressee at least as much true information as sentence \(S'\) in all cases, and transmits strictly more true information than \(S'\) in some cases triggered by Fallibility, then it is to be preferred to \(S'\). (Schlenker 2012, p. 406)

    Schlenker adds the qualification ‘for the moment’ here because this is the global version of the Gricean account. Later in the article, Schlenker provides a definitive, local version. Since our examples do not require bringing in local contexts, and in order to keep things simple, I will work with the formulation above.

  30. I cannot do justice to Magri’s nuanced and elaborate view in the space of this article. However, a brief discussion of his work will at least serve to highlight the point that the problem for the presuppositional theory of slurs is independent of whether antipresuppositions are grammatical or Gricean in nature. Magri’s view has been criticized by Schlenker (2012) and Singh (2009), from different perspectives.

  31. Making EXH depend on is a way of accounting for the optionality of antipresuppositions (the same goes for scalar implicatures), since on Magri’s view EXH is mandatory in matrix clauses. Other grammatical analyses (see Fox 2007) account for optionality by making EXH itself optional, so that there are two different parses of the sentence, only one of which includes EXH.

  32. ‘’ represents the relation of mutual entailment w.r.t. common knowledge.

  33. As far as I can see, using Cepollaro and Stojanovic’s rendition of the presupposition makes no difference w.r.t. the present point.

  34. A reviewer objects that the slur and its neutral counterpart are not contextually equivalent, since one of them is a taboo word and the other is not. In this framework, however, contextual equivalence is defined as mutual entailment with respect to common knowledge. This condition is indeed satisfied in the case under discussion, since the slur and its neutral counterpart have the same truth-conditional content and we are considering prejudiced contexts. I will discuss taboos in detail in the next section.

  35. Magri’s account of pragmatic infelicity is formulated in terms of secondary antipresuppositions. But as he notes (Magri 2011, fn. 8), his account could also be developed in terms of primary antipresuppositions.

  36. Crucially, we need to assume a very strong view about taboos if we want to appeal to them to avoid the problem. If we allowed taboos to be sometimes weak, we would not be able to assume that a taboo always takes precedence over conversational maxims like Maximize Presupposition! Hence, we could construct contexts for examples (20) and (21) where the taboo cannot explain why the speaker avoided the slur, and then the absence of the antipresupposition would become problematic.

  37. Arguably, there are some cultures where there is no such thing as a prohibition of slurs in Anderson and Lepore’s sense. Slurs are doubtless derogatory and offensive, but indirect reports, echoic uses, and mentions (let alone uses of phonologically similar words) are not problematic at all, as long as it is clear that the speaker does not subscribe to the original, derogatory use (see Caso 2020 for an analysis of indirect reports in Rio de la Plata’s Spanish). Still, at least in those cultures, using the neutral counterpart does not trigger the antipresuppositions under discussion.

  38. Thanks to Matías Verdecchia for suggesting this example.

  39. See Asher and Lascarides (2013) for an account that derives this inference within a pragmatic framework. Also note that it is easy to imagine parallel cases involving presuppositional alternatives. Imagine a trial for tax evasion. While being cross-examined, the defendant says:

    1. (1)

      Each time I paid taxes I informed my partners in the company.

    The antipresupposition is that the speaker paid taxes more than once, and the prosecutor will certainly draw this inference despite the context not being fully cooperative—although (if she is a good prosecutor) she will not assume that the speaker did pay taxes on many occasions.

  40. Non-bigots also avoid slurs, but arguably not because of the taboo surrounding them or because they may come at a social cost, but because they believe the associated presuppositions to be false. Note that awareness of this fact does not suffice to derive the antipresupposition.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and an anonymous reviewer for NALS, as well as the members of the BA-LingPhil group and the audience of the WIP seminar in Buenos Aires for their comments, suggestions, and objections. Special thanks to Eleonora Orlando, Andrés Saab, and Ramiro Caso for reading and commenting on previous versions of this article.

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  1. Agencia Nacional de Promoción en Ciencia y Técnica, Buenos Aires, 642 Bulnes St., C1176ABL, Argentina

    Nicolás Lo Guercio

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The research leading to this paper was partially made possible through support from the National Agency for Scientific and Technological Promotion (ANPCyT), in the form of a postdoctoral fellowship belonging to Research Grant PICT 2016-0438.

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Lo Guercio, N. Slurs and antipresuppositions. Nat Lang Semantics 29, 377–400 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-021-09178-y

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