Linguistics An Essential Introduction (Version 1.5)

Slurs are offensive words that degrade people based on aspects such as ethnicity (think of the N‑word or words like Chink or Polack), sex class (think of words like bitch or slut), sexual orientation (think of words like fag or dyke), ability (think of words like cripple or idiot) etc.

Such slurs have a denotational meaning that can typically be expressed in neutral terms — sometimes as a single word, sometimes as a paraphrase. In addition, they express a negative evaluation of the group in question on the part of the speaker.

Recall the example, from Section 1.3 of Zoe telling her grandfather about her linguistics professor who mistakes the professor’s name for a Polish name. He could respond to her in the ways shown in (1):

In the first case, Zoe’s grandfather is making a single statement:

In the second case, he is making the same statement, but adding a second one containing an evaluation:

The difference between the two statements must be related to the use of the words Pole and Polack — the first one is a neutral word, whose intension does not contain any evaluation on the part of the speaker, the second one is a slur which does contain such an evaluation. There is quite a bit of debate in the research literature as to what the evaluative meaning of slurs is and whether it is the same in all cases — for the purposes of our discussion, we have represented it here in a very general way as a statement about the value of the group in question.

The first indication that the evaluative meaning communicated in (2b) is a presupposition is that we cannot contradict it. If Zoe’s grandfather says (3) and Zoe contradicts him, as in (4a), she is contradicting the descriptive statement ‘the person called Stefanowitsch is Polish’, not the evaluation ‘Polish people have less value than other people’, and if she agrees, as in (4b), she agrees with the descriptive statement, not the evaluative one:

So, whatever she replies, she always accepts the evaluative statements implicitly, in the same way that we accept any proposition when we evaluate the truth of a statement.

Additional evidence for the fact that the evaluative statement associated with the use of slurs is a presupposition comes from the fact that it remains constant if we use the slur in a question (5) or if we embed it in a counterfactual context (6):

However, it is a special kind of presupposition in at least two ways. First, if it were a normal presupposition, we should be able to cancel it, but this does not seem possible:

Second, the presupposition is clearly false — Polish people do have the same value as any other group of people. This should make any statement containing the word Polack indeterminate with respect to its truth value — it should be neither true nor false. However, this does not seem to be the case. as (8) shows:

The reason for this odd behaviour is that the presuppositions associated with slurs do not concern any aspect of the world at all — they are expressive, i.e., they concern the inner life of the speaker. A better way of representing is (9):

Since we are the only authority as to our inner lives, any presupposition we communicate with respect to that inner life counts as true — that is why it cannot be cancelled.

Of course, the fact that we as addressees of a statement containing a slur cannot cancel its expressive presupposition does not mean that we cannot respond to it. We can switch to a metalinguistic level and challenge the use of the term, as in (10a), or we can directly challenge the content of the presupposition, as in (10b):

Because the negative evaluation is presupposed rather than communicated directly, however, Zoe’s grandfather can still feign innocence concerning it. He could claim that he was unaware of the negative connotation. He could even deny that the word has a negative connotation, claiming that this was a perfectly normal word when he was younger, that he has nothing against Poles, that some of his best friends are Poles, etc.

He could not do any of these things if, instead of relying on the expressive presupposition associated with the word Polack, he had made the statement in (1b) explicitly, by saying something like the following:

This is what makes slurs so insidious: not only do language users using a slur suggest that the group referred to has less value or humanity than other people, but they do so in a way that makes it difficult to contradict them or to hold them responsible.