Pejoratives, contexts and presuppositions

Abstract

Kaplan started a fruitful debate on the meaning of pejoratives. He suggests that a dimension of expressive meaning is required, separated from the straightforward “at issue” content. To account for this, writers have elaborated on this suggestion, by arguing that the separated expressive meaning of pejoratives and slurs is instead either a conventional or conversational implicatures, or a presupposition. I myself prefer a presuppositional account; however, in order to deflate a very serious objection that has been raised against accounts of that kind, it is on the one hand essential that we take what is presupposed to be genuinely expressive, and, related, it is also essential that we adopt a more complex view than the one usually assumed on the nature of the context relative to which speech acts make their contributions.