That’s what he said: an empirical investigation on reporting slurs
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1
Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Philosophy, Italy
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2
Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Psychology, Italy
The last twenty years witnessed a growing interest in slurs in philosophy and linguistics. Slurs are usually defined as pejoratives targeting people on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, gender, etc. A noteworthy feature of pejoratives is that pejorative content tends to project out of semantic embedding. An utterance of ‘Is Laura a wop?’ or ‘If Laura is a wop, she knows how to make pasta’ seems to convey the same racist attitude as ‘Laura is a wop’. In this paper, we present three studies on how slurs and other pejoratives work in direct and reported speech. While nearly everyone agrees that ‘Peter is a faggot’ is offensive, intuitions about the offensiveness of slurs in indirect reports are shaky. Suppose Mark utters: ‘Sue said that Peter is a faggot’. Is he being homophobic? Or is he just being an accurate reporter? The question is whether the verbum dicendi ‘say’ can seal the offensiveness of pejoratives. Philosophers and linguists addressed the issue of slurring reports (see Anderson, 2016; Anderson and Lepore, 2013a, 2013b; Bach, forthcoming; Capone, 2016; Langton et al., 2012; Potts, 2005; Schlenker, 2007; Wieland, 2013), but there is not much agreement and many theories are utterly incompatible. We can distinguish at least two families of approaches: prohibitionist and non-prohibitionist. According to prohibitionist accounts (see Anderson, 2016; Anderson & Lepore, 2013a, 2013b; Langton et al., 2012), slurs are offensive because they are prohibited; if a speaker reports a slurring sentence, she is always responsible for the offensiveness: by reporting a slur, she breaks herself the prohibition on the use of slurs. Non-prohibitionist accounts are an heterogeneous group of theories claiming that the reporting speaker need not be always responsible for the slurring. E.g., Schlenker (2007) acknowledges that the reporter of a slurring utterance can be perceived as offensive, but he also predicts that under certain circumstances, hearers ascribe the offensive attitude to the reported rather than to the reporting speaker. The offensiveness is attributed to one of the two speakers: either to the reporting or to the reported one. Another non-prohibitionist view on indirect report is Capone (2016)’s. For Capone, the responsibility is a matter of degree: the reported speaker is the most responsible one for the slurring, while the reporting speaker is only responsible, to a lesser extent, for having failed to omit an offensive term from her report. While prohibitionists predict that the offensiveness of slurs is not sealed when slurs are reported, non-prohibitionists acknowledge that sometimes the responsibility is ascribed to the reported speaker (Schlenker, 2007), or that the reporting speaker is less responsible than the reported one (Capone, 2016).
Despite the theoretical work on slurs in indirect reports, there is no or little empirical literature that investigates this topic (see Panzeri and Carrus, 2016). Our work aims to fill such a gap. In this work, we present three on-line studies conducted in Italian: (i) a Pilot study where we asked participants to evaluate the offensiveness of slurs (e.g., ‘faggot’), neutral labels (e.g., ‘gay’), and non-slurring insults (e.g., ‘fuck’) in isolation on a 1-7 point scale; (ii) Study 1 where we asked participants to evaluate the offensiveness of slurs, neutral labels, and non-slurring insults on a 1-7 point scale in simple utterances of the form ‘X is a P’, where X is a proper name and ‘is a P’ a predicate (e.g. slur: ‘Peter is a faggot’; neutral label: ‘Peter is a homosexual’; non-slurring insult: ‘Peter is a jerk’); (iii) Study 2, where we asked participants to evaluate on a 1-7 point scale the offensiveness of utterances of the forms ‘Y: ‘X is a P’’ (direct speech) and of the form ‘Z: ‘Y said that X is a P’’ (indirect speech, i.e. report), where X, Y, and Z are proper names and ‘is a P’ is a predicate (a slur, a neutral label, or a non-slurring insult).
The three studies together provide interesting findings:
(i) The Pilot study shows that slurs are perceived as more offensive than non-slurring insults when presented in isolation (Fig. 1). This is in line with the widespread idea that slurs, in addition to derogating specific individuals, also derogate a whole category;
(ii) Study 1 revealed a differentiation between slurs and insults that was not predicted by any theory of slurs. Despite the fact that slurs are perceived as more offensive than insults in isolation, an atomic predication of the form ‘X is a P’ is perceived as significantly less offensive if P is a slur rather than an insult (Fig. 2, left panel). This fact is not predicted by any theory of slurs; we put forward an information-based hypothesis to explain the phenomenon by appealing to the double function of slurs: not only are they used to evaluate negatively but they also provide descriptive information;
(iii) Study 2 shows that utterances featuring slurs or insults are perceived as less offensive when embedded in a report (even though still offensive; Fig. 2, right panel). This contradicts Anderson and Lepore (2013a), (2013b), and Anderson (2016)’s predictions on slurs in reported speech, it poses difficulties to Schlenker (2007), while being compatible with Capone (2016).
To sum up, our studies find that unlike other insults, slurs are perceived as less offensive when attributed to a subject rather than being in isolation. This may have to do with the fact that slurs play a double function when attributed to subjects: evaluating and describing. This supports cognitivist over non-cognitivist theories of slurs. Moreover, to report a slur decreases its offensiveness, without deleting it: to report a slur is perceived as offensive, but less than uttering it in direct speech, which seems to speak against Anderson and Lepore’s Silentism.
References
Anderson, Luvell 2016. When Reporting Others Backfires. In Capone, Alessandro; Ferenc, Kiefer & Lo Piparo, Franco (eds.), Indirect Reports and Pragmatics, Springer International Publishing. 253-264.
Anderson, Luvell & Lepore, Ernest 2013a. Slurring words. Nous 47 (1). 25-48.
Anderson, Luvell & Lepore, Ernest 2013b. What did you call me? Slurs as prohibited words. Analytic Philosophy 54 (3). 350-363.
Bach, Kent forthcoming. Loaded Words: On the Semantics and Pragmatics of Slurs. In Sosa, David (ed.), Bad Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Capone, Alessandro 2016. The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports. Springer International Publishing.
Langton, Rae, Haslanger, Sally, & Anderson, Luvell (2012), “Language and Race”, In Russell, Gillian, and Graff Fara, Delia (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Routledge, London, 753-767.
Panzeri, Francesca, & Carrus, Simone 2016. Slurs and Negation. Phenomenology and Mind 11. 170-180.
Potts, Christopher 2005. The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schlenker, Philippe 2007. Expressive presuppositions. Theoretical Linguistics 33 (2). 237-245.
Wieland, Nellie 2013. Indirect reports and pragmatics. In Capone, Alessandro; Lo Piparo, Franco & Carapezza, Marco (eds.), Perspectives on pragmatics and Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer.
Keywords:
slurs,
Insults,
Indirect reports,
Perceived offensiveness,
expressives
Conference:
XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference, Pavia, Italy, 30 May - 1 Jun, 2018.
Presentation Type:
Poster or Oral
Topic:
Experimental Pragmatics
Citation:
Bianchi
C,
Cepollaro
B and
Sulpizio
S
(2018). That’s what he said: an empirical investigation on reporting slurs.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.73.00025
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Received:
15 May 2018;
Published Online:
14 Dec 2018.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Bianca Cepollaro, Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Philosophy, Milan, Italy, bianca.cepollaro@gmail.com