Data: dijous 18 de febrer del 2021

Hora: 12.00 h

Accés: en línia, amb Collaborate (Enllaç: eu.bbcollab.com/guest/cbd918ec0de7403f94ba44b0a67b7a2d)

Resum:

The semantic literature on expressive terms, such as 'bastard' and 'jerk', converges on two claims. The first one is the idea that the use of such terms is felicitous as long as the speaker has a negative attitude toward the person for whom they are using the pejorative, and does not place any special constraints on the conversational context. We have argued against this idea in our "When is it OK to call someone a jerk? An experimental investigation of expressives" (Synthese 2020, doi 10.1007/s11229-020-02633-z). The second claim is that the content associated with expressives is subjective, i.e. it amounts to something like 'the speaker feels negatively about the target'. We have argued against this idea in a new study in which we have focused on the predicative - rather than referential - uses and investigated what is the content associated with expressives. Our new study replicates the results of the first one: it shows that expressives in their predicative use are sensitive to contextual information, and that they are judged less acceptable than other negatively valenced, evaluative terms, such as 'unbearable'. We observe that negatively valenced terms in general (expressives and non-expressives alike) are, ceteris paribus, judged to be less acceptable than positive evaluative terms, such as ‘smart’ and ‘kind’. As for how to spell out the expressive content, speakers tend to take the meaning of a sentence such as "X is a jerk" to be objective ("X must have done something bad") rather than subjective ("The speaker dislikes X"). This tendency shows up both in a selection study, in which participants have been asked to choose the most appropriate paraphrase, as well as in a rating study, in which the subjective vs. objective conditions are used in the description of the context of utterance. While negative terms (expressives and non-expressives alike) tend to be interpreted in a more objective manner, there is a strong preference to interpret positive terms in a more subjective, speaker-oriented manner. Note that within negative terms, expressives are in general judged less acceptable than non-expressive evaluatives, yet the latter get to be associated with objective contents to a higher degree. This suggests that the relationship between negative valence, tendency toward objective interpretation, and acceptability, is more complex than one may have thought.