The social significance of slang

Mind and Language (forthcoming)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

It is well‐established within linguistics that slang serves a group‐identifying function. In this paper, a new understanding of the notion of lexical metadata is developed to provide a philosophical treatment of said function. The proposed account explains the group‐identifying function of slang in terms of certain inferences about a speaker's group affiliations that people competent with a slang word will be disposed to make given the lexical metadata related to the word in question. The resulting view is theoretically simple and may extend to a whole range of linguistic phenomena that speakers utilize to position themselves in social space.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 103,486

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2024-11-01

Downloads
36 (#669,646)

6 months
36 (#112,787)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Alice Damirjian
Stockholm University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The Social Life of Slurs.Geoff Nunberg - 2018 - In Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris & Matt Moss, New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford University Press. pp. 237–295.
Dogwhistles, Political Manipulation, and Philosophy of Language.Jennifer Saul - 2018 - In Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris & Matt Moss, New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford University Press. pp. 360–383.
Logic and Conversation.H. Paul Grice - 1989 - In Herbert Paul Grice, Studies in the way of words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 22-40.
Slurring Perspectives.Elisabeth Camp - 2013 - Analytic Philosophy 54 (3):330-349.

View all 14 references / Add more references