Author Description

This Book Challenges Both Sorts Of Approaches And Defends A Novel Alternative, According To Which The Source Of A Pejorative Effect Is The Negative Associations Triggered Not By Every Token Of A Pejorative, But Rather By Certain Of Its Articulations-phonological And/or Orthographic. We Need To Distinguish Pejorative Language From Its Articulations Because, Surprisingly, The Latter Can Trigger A Pejorative Effect Even When The Former Is Not Tokened, Say, When A Distinct Expression Shares An Articulation With A Pejorative Term; And Further, Even When Articulated, A Token Of A Pejorative May Not Cause Any Harm, Say, If The Articulation Is Nonstandard, Or Sufficiently Distinct From Standard Articulations Of The Pejorative Term, Or Even If It's One Of The Standard Articulations That Happens To Lacks The Relevant Associations; Or So We Will Argue. Our Claim That The Pejorative Effect Of A Slur Has, Strictly Speaking, Not Much To Do With Language And, In Particular, With Slurs Themselves, Will Come Across Not Only As Surprising, But Even As Preposterous. However, Evidence For The Claim Is Overwhelming. To Make This Case, We Will Need To Critically Examine Extant Proposals, Outlining Along The Way Desiderata That Any Satisfactory Account Must Meet. As We Shall See, Neither Content-based Accounts-those That Locate The Source Of A Pejorative Effect In Content, Either Semantically Expressed Or Pragmatically Conveyed-nor Those Accounts That Locate It In The Taboo Status Of The Expression-account For The Data. Our Positive Account-the Articulation Account-will Emerge As Uniquely Well-positioned To Account For The Full Range Of Data And Do So In A Fully Uniform Manner-- Provided By Publisher.