Indirectly reporting and translating slurring utterances

pp. 171-191

in: Alessandro Capone, The pragmatics of indirect reports, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

In this chapter, I am going to examine the intricate connection between indirectly reporting and translating utteranes, to move forward with the application of this connection to slurring. Since I (more or less) consider slurring a derogatory speech act (albeit a secondary speech act, one that cannot be carried out unless one performs another speech act, like, e.g. asserting), the question I examine reduces to how one can indirectly report or translate the speech act of slurring. I will pay attention to the idea that slurring is a derogatory speech act (and possibly one in a series of speech acts aimed at maintaining the status quo, that is the social distinction between social categories (e.g. blacks vs. whites)). This idea of slurring as a derogatory speech act is similar to the idea by Croom (2008, 2011, 2013a, b, 2014) (and other scholars such as Saka (1998) and Potts (2007)) that slurring contains both an ideational component and an expressive one. However, the expressive dimension is more regulated than one may have thought, so much so that I venture the idea of a speech act (with an appropriate distinction between the micro speech act of slurring and the macro speech act of dominating by a series of micro speech acts) (see van Dijk 1980 on macrostructures).