David Beaver, University of Texas at Austin
Please join us for a colloquium talk that will be given by David Beaver (University of Texas at Austin) on Thursday, October 31, at 3:30 p.m. in Stuart 105. Prof. Beaver’s title and abstract are given below.
The colloquium will be followed by a tea (to which dinner will be delivered) in Rosenwald 301. In addition, if you would like to meet with Prof. Beaver one-on-one, please let Sharese know (sharesek@uchicago.edu).
Hell Raising: on the socio-semantics of slurs
A theory of slurs must account for three properties. Slurs are:
1. Ideologically revelatory: bringing a “complex of historical facts and constructed attitudes [...] to attention” although it’s “hard [...] to discern exactly what those attitudes are, or what the precise historical facts being deployed are”, as McCready and Davis put it.
2. Exigent: forcibly impacting hearers’ emotional states.
3. Hyper-projective: uttering a slur can still have significant communicative effects when the slur is embedded, even within quotation. This blurs the distinction between use and mention.
The account I will present is drawn from my recent book “The Politics of Language” with Jason Stanley (chapter 9). We show that the above properties result from aspects of conventionalized meaning that are common to language in general, combined with a social milieu in which social groups and their ideologies are in competition.