Inflammatory Content

In their Inflammatory Language, Stojnić and Lepore present four major criticisms of content-based views of pejorative language: 1) the Projection Argument; 2) the Hyperprojection Argument; 3) the Specificity Argument; and 4) the Reclamation Argument. This paper argues that a content-based view can adequately respond to each of these criticisms. The paper goes on to consider their positive view, the Articulation Account, and argues that it suffers from being both under-specified and overly ambitious. Even when the view is plausibly precisified as a functional role theory of articulations, a serious dilemma arises: focusing on the sound or shape of the articulation is problematic when considering counterexamples like the racist use of ‘Monday’ as code for the N-word, and focusing on the functional role of the articulation is problematic when considering how little functional similarity there is between the Mandarin demonstrative term (‘那个’) and the N-word. The paper also presents the applications of two external criticisms deriving from the Identity Thesis and the Framework Fallacy and concludes that the Articulation Account falls short of being a leading contender in the analytic space of views for pejorative language.