The Semantics and Pragmatics of Slurs and Thick Terms Bianca Cepollaro
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The Semantics and Pragmatics of slurs and thick terms Bianca Cepollaro To cite this version: Bianca Cepollaro. The Semantics and Pragmatics of slurs and thick terms. Philosophy. Uni- versité Paris sciences et lettres; Scuola normale superiore (Pise, Italie), 2017. English. NNT : 2017PSLEE003. tel-01508856 HAL Id: tel-01508856 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01508856 Submitted on 14 Apr 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. THÈSE DE DOCTORAT de l’Université de recherche Paris Sciences et Lettres PSL Research University Préparée dans le cadre d’une cotutelle entre Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa et École Normale Supérieure, Paris La sémantique et la pragmatique des termes d’offense et des termes éthiques épais Ecole doctorale n°540 ÉCOLE TRANSDISCIPLINAIRE LETTRES/SCIENCES Spécialité Philosophie COMPOSITION DU JURY : Mme. JESHION Robin University of South California, Rapporteur M. VÄYRYNEN Pekka University of Leeds, Rapporteur Mme. BIANCHI Claudia Soutenue par Bianca Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Membre du jury CEPOLLARO Le 20 janvier 2017h Mme. SBISÀ Marina Università degli Studi di Trieste, Membre du jury Dirigée par Pier Marco BERTINETTO et Isidora STOJANOVIC The semantics and pragmatics of slurs and thick terms Bianca Cepollaro Abstract In this thesis I develop a uniform account of slurs and thick terms in terms of presuppositions. I argue that slurs and thick terms – that were mainly studied by different disciplines – belong to the same class of ‘hybrid evaluatives’. My work is a contribution in filling the gap between the research on thick terms on the one hand and the research on slurs on the other, by showing that the mechanism underlying slurs and thick terms is one and the same and that the phenomenal differences that one can observe depend on the peculiarities of their descriptive content. In Part I, I define what counts as ‘hybrid evaluative’ and present my presuppositional account. Part II is a critical review of some alternative theories that have been put forward to account for slurs and thick terms respectively. In Part III, I propose a uniform account of two particular uses of slurs and thick terms that have been treated as independent so far, namely Appropriation of Slurs and Variability of thick terms. 1 Acknowledgements Many thanks to Inés Crespo, Christopher Gauker, Michael Glanzberg, Robin Jeshion, Max Kölbel, Uriah Kriegel, Robert May, Geoffrey Nunberg, Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, François Recanati, Jennifer Saul, Marina Sbisà, Philippe Schlenker, Andrés Soria Ruiz, Benjamin Spector, Brent Strickland, Tristan Thommen, Giuliano Torrengo, Pekka Väyrynen and Julia Zakkou for engaging discussions and very helpful suggestions. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisors Pier Marco Bertinetto and Isidora Stojanovic for being inspiring and supporting throughout. I am especially grateful to Claudia Bianchi, who is always teaching me something. Many thanks also to the audience and commentators in the workshops and seminars in Pisa, Malta, Bucharest, Gargnano, Paris, Trieste, Milan, Barcelona, Storrs and Dubrovnik for their precious insights and for the good time. Special thanks to my friends and colleagues in Pisa, Paris, Milan and all around the world: I have been incredibly fortunate to meet each of you. Heartfelt thanks to my closest friends, to my family, to my parents, Biagio and Francesca, to my brother, Carlo and to Gio. 2 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. PART I. THE PRESUPPOSITIONAL ACCOUNT OF HYBRID EVALUATIVES . 1. What counts as a hybrid evaluative ......................................................................................... 14 1.1 What slurs are about.............................................................................................................. 17 1.2 Distinguishing thick terms from thin terms .......................................................................... 20 1.3 Previous suggestions for a uniform account ......................................................................... 24 2. The projective behavior of slurs and thick terms ................................................................... 27 2.1 Projection .............................................................................................................................. 28 2.2 Rejection ............................................................................................................................... 32 2.3 An alternative explanation of projection ............................................................................... 36 3. The semantics of hybrid evaluatives ........................................................................................ 38 3.1 The evaluative content .......................................................................................................... 39 3.1.1 Gradability ..................................................................................................................... 40 3.1.2 Multidimensionality ...................................................................................................... 42 3.1.3 How to interpret the evaluative content ......................................................................... 44 3.1.4 Inter-variation and intra-variation.................................................................................. 46 3.2 The descriptive content ......................................................................................................... 48 3.3 When things go wrong: presuppositional failure .................................................................. 52 3.3.1 Reference and extension ................................................................................................ 52 3.3.2 What is exactly presupposed ......................................................................................... 53 3.3.3 Failure ............................................................................................................................ 55 3.3.4 A theory of value ........................................................................................................... 60 4. The Dynamics of hybrid evaluatives: complicity, propaganda, negotiation ......................... 62 4.1 Slurs in conversation ............................................................................................................. 63 4.1.1 The shortcut of discrimination ....................................................................................... 73 4.2 Thick terms: negotiation and conceptual ethics .................................................................... 76 5. Defending the presuppositional account ................................................................................. 82 5.1 Slurs and presuppositions ..................................................................................................... 82 5.2 Thick terms and presuppositions ........................................................................................... 90 6. Conclusion: the residual differences between slurs and thick terms .................................... 93 3 6.1 The semantics ....................................................................................................................... 94 6.2 The projective behavior ........................................................................................................ 96 PART II. RIVAL THEORIES .................................................................................... 7. Truth-conditional theories of slurs: It’s just a matter of semantics .................................... 102 7.1. Denying some projection data ........................................................................................... 106 7.2 Explaining some projection data: derogation and offense ................................................... 114 8. Kyle’s semantic analysis of thick terms ................................................................................. 118 8.1 Repeatability and redundancy ............................................................................................. 124 9. Deflationary accounts of slurs: It’s just a matter of pragmatics ......................................... 126 9.1 Anderson and Lepore: violating prohibitions and taboos ................................................... 126 9.2 Bolinger: co-occurrence expectations and contrastive preferences..................................... 131 9.3 Nunberg: markedness, affiliation and manner implicatures ................................................ 138 9.4 A note on markedness ......................................................................................................... 142 9.5 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 146 10. Deflationary accounts of thick terms ..................................................................................