Exactly, what do you mean?

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the boundaries of a subset of the evaluative uses of language: offensive speech. More in particular, our goal is twofold. Firstly, we want to chart the relationship between context and evaluative utterances, as it stands in the current literature. Secondly, we focus on the experimental study of a particular interaction between contextual information and our evaluative claims -when the context is able to turn a seemingly descriptive utterance into an evaluative one. For this second purpose, we argue, certain recent positive proposals, in spite of their merit, come a bit short.