Séminaire des Linguistes avec l'appui de LinguiLille

Luca Gasparri (STL) et Gerhard Schaden (STL) : slurring without nouns

Slurs are offensive expressions that demean individuals or groups of individuals on the basis of their gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, and similar attributes. While standard definitions of slurs focus on the offensive potential characteristic of these terms and make no reference to word class, the overwhelming majority of the slurs discussed in the literature are nouns, and so are most of the slurs in languages like English (e.g., the N-, the F-, or the C-word). Why is this the case? Recent work has suggested that the predominance of nominal slurs can be attributed to the fact that slurs convey their offensive potential by exploiting the inferential biases associated with nominal predication, and therefore that nouniness is effectively a precondition for slurriness. We will present and discuss data from Italian and German, where clear instances of slurriness appear to be found in the grammatical categories of adjectives and verbs. We will argue that these data point to a more complex picture of the relationship between slurriness and nouniness, and we will sketch an alternative account of the relationship at hand.

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