Offensive Uses of Language: Slurring and Synecdochical Utterances

Be advised that some offensive language is mentioned in the following abstract. ‘That woman’s a dyke’. ‘She’s a piece of ass’. The former utterance is an example of a slurring utterance, and the latter is an instance of an utterance that I call a Synecdochical Utterance Targeting Women (SUTW). A synecdochical utterance targeting women is one in which an anatomical part term is predicated of a woman. What these utterances have in common is that, in many contexts in which either is uttered, the speaker does something at least alienating, if not disrespectful or worse. I argue, in this dissertation, for a theory of the distinctive act that the slurring speaker undertakes, and for a theory of the distinctive act that the SUTW speaker performs, that enables her to alienate, convey disrespect, or otherwise. The slurring speaker distances herself from the target, an act whereby she pledges to support a group that the slur she uses does not target and refuses to support the group that it does target. This act is separate from predicating the property that a slur expresses of the targeted person. I present a theory of which property this is, as well. On my theory of the property that a slur expresses, the slur expresses an essence. The kind of disrespectful act that a SUTW speaker performs is conversationally implicating disrespectful propositions, whose subject is the woman in question.