Masha EsipovaFeb 3, 2023

A new manuscript! I finally wrote up my experiment on slurs under ellipsis: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007109 (submitted for review, comments welcome)

I aim to establish if the prejudice component of slurs can be preserved under ellipsis, and what this tells us about its semantic nature. 1/3

The silence of the slurs: inferences about prejudice under ellipsis - lingbuzz/007109

In this paper, I aim to establish whether the prejudice component of slurs can be preserved under ellipsis, with the ultimate goal of elucidating the semantic nature of this meaning component. To do s - lingbuzz, the linguistics archive

Show threadMasha Esipova

So I ran an inference judgement task asking the participants to assess how likely it is that a given speaker is prejudiced against a (fictional) group based on how they respond to an antecedent utterance containing a (fictional) slur targeting this group.

Responses where the speaker repeats the slur yield the highest prejudice likelihood ratings & responses where the speaker indirectly challenges the antecedent use of the slur by replacing it w/a neutral counterpart yield the lowest ones. 2/3

Feb 3, 2023 at 7:06pmWeb
Show threadMasha EsipovaFeb 3, 2023

Crucially, elliptical responses that require lexical identity for the slur (one replacement targeting an antecedent noun slur) yield higher prejudice likelihood ratings than those that don't (bare particle & VPE responses).

This calls for a hybrid analysis: the act of uttering a slur produces a performative effect (lost under ellipsis), but slurs also have a non-performative truth-conditional (yet not-at-issue) prejudice component (preserved under ellipsis if the slur itself is recovered). 3/3