Atención a la diversidad

The first observation in assessing Thommen’s (2017) claims is that slurs are not particularly good examples when it comes to figuring out what expressive meaning is. First, they are quite different from classical expressives such as ‘damn’, ‘bastard’ etc. because as was noted before they do not participate in semantic composition in the same way as the latter do (they are ‘propositional’, or ‘isolated’, i.e. they come saturated, unlike ‘predicative’ classical expressives, in McCready’s 2010 words). This means that whatever conclusions we draw from observing the behaviour of slurs will not be automatically applicable to classical expressives. But secondly and most importantly, much more than typical expressives, slurs are extremely sensitive words with potentially detrimental social effects, which could be more adequately explained based on the idea of taboo or prohibition (Anderson & Lepore 2013). As was mentioned in the

93 previous chapter, often the offence of slurs cannot be contained even by quotation, so it should not come as a surprise that slurs cannot be filtered but project across the board. The fact that slurs project more robustly than presuppositions, therefore, does not seem as sound evidence that expressives are not presuppositions, as slurs are different from classical expressives. So we need to see whether Thommen’s tests produce the same results using classical expressives in order to assess if there is indeed strong evidence against the presuppositional account.

To remind the reader, Thommen’s general point was that expressives are not filterable like ordinary presuppositions are, and the task now is to see whether this is confirmed by classical expressives as it was with slurs. But it turns out that there are examples of (classical) expressives with conditionalisation, a fact which suggests filterability:

(163) I consider John a saint. But if he ever screws me over, I’ll crush the bastard like a bug. (Lasersohn 2007: 12)

(164) I love my computer, I’ve had it for almost 7 years and it’s still working fine. But if it breaks down during the interview, I swear I’ll smash the damn thing.

(107) Sono ronbun-no chousha-ga yuumei-na kyouju nara, LSA-ni irassharu hazu da. Demo gakusei-nara, ko-nai kamoshirenai. (Sudo 2012)81

the article-GEN author-NOM famous professor if, LSA to comeHON definitely. but student if, come-NEG come

‘If the author of that article is a famous professor, he will definitely comeHON to LSA. But if he is a student, he might not come.’

Because of the conditional constructions involved, in the above examples it feels that no offence (or honouring) is actually taking place, as the speaker is merely stating the conditions under which it would take place. As Lasersohn (2005: 227) notes for his own example:

A speaker of (12) [in this dissertation: 163, R.C.] might be accused of being volatile, but not incoherent. This discourse does not commit the speaker to the position that John is a bastard; on the contrary, the speaker makes clear that he or she considers John to be a saint. The description of John as a bastard is conditionalised on the (unexpected) event of his “screwing over” the speaker, so that the expressive content does not project up to the sentence as a whole. Lasersohn’s explanation directly applies to (164), as this example was constructed based on his own. And as was previously noted for (107), the speaker only finds the referent worthy of respect/honouring under the condition that they are a professor, not

81 _{This example uses Japanese honorifics, which as discussed previously, have been shown to be}

much more like presuppositions than Pottsian expressives by Sudo (2012). As a result, it might seem that it should not figure here, since the current discussion is about classical expressives. However, I want to remind the reader that the claim in the previous chapter was that Japanese honorifics are not a special kind of meaning which is both non-presuppositional (and not at-issue, of course) and compositionally relevant, as advocated by Gutzmann (2015), but an instance of good ole presupposition. I have decided to include Japanese honorifics as an example in this discussion exactly because it is a discussion defending the idea that classical expressives are also presuppositions – just like Japanese honorifics. Any reader who strongly feels that this example shouldn’t have been included is invited to disregard it and consider only the other examples.

94 unreservedly. So we have evidence for filterability for the classical expressives ‘bastard’ and ‘damn’, very similarly to Japanese honorifics which have already been shown to be presuppositions (Sudo 2012).

But even if we acknowledge that there is some filtering, we may also grant that there is some kind of projection which is not 100% filtered. That this is happening can be diagnosed by interlocutors’ possible reactions/challenges to the expressives (bastard, damn) or to honorifics; if the filtering was 100% successful, then no challenge would have been possible, as in the following case with an ordinary presupposition:

(165) If France is a monarchy, the King of France is bald. # Hey wait a minute! I didn’t know France was a monarchy.

But interestingly, the examples involving classical expressives and honorifics are not felicitously challenged by the classical ‘HWAM I didn’t know…’ test for presuppositions (Shannon 1976, von Fintel 2004) but rather metalinguistically, by employing a metalinguistic variant of the test which targets the term in question, such as ‘HWAM you shouldn’t use that word/why are you using that word’ (Camp 2013)82,83:

(166) I consider John a saint. But if he ever screws me over, I’ll crush the bastard like a bug.

# Hey wait a minute! I didn’t know you considered John a bastard!

Hey wait a minute! You shouldn’t use that word (to talk about John). It’s offensive.

(167) I love my computer, I’ve had it for almost 7 years and it’s still working fine. But if it breaks down during the interview, I swear I’ll smash the damn thing.

# Hey wait a minute! I didn’t know you thought badly of your computer. Hey wait a minute! You shouldn’t use that word. It’s offensive.

(168) Sono ronbun-no chousha-ga yuumei-na kyouju nara, LSA-ni irassharu hazu da. Demo gakusei-nara, ko-nai kamoshirenai.

82 _{In a paper about slurs, Camp (2013: 342) contends the following:}

‘the most natural form of challenge to a slur is typically metalinguistic, as in:

Hey wait a minute! You shouldn’t use that word to talk about Hispanic people – it’s offensive and demeaning.

Notably, this is also the form of challenge that is most natural for other perspectival expressions, such as ‘tu’/’vous’, slang expressions for parents, or thick pejorative terms like ‘snitch’ ’.

83 _{A similar metalinguistic way of targeting the expressive content is Predelli’s (2013) ‘Cautious}

Assent Test’, i.e. ‘yes, but…’ as a way to agree to the character but challenge what he calls the ‘bias’ component of meaning (more on this below).

95 ‘If the author of that article is a famous professor, he will definitely comeHON to LSA. But if he is a student, he might not come.’

# Chotto matte! Anata-ga kyouju-wo sonkei shite iru towa shira-na-katta-yo. Hey, wait a minute! I didn’t know you respected professors.

Chotto matte! Sono sonkeigo nandayo? Chotto yarisugi janai? Hey, wait a minute! Why an honorific? Isn’t it a bit too much?

Considering the above, the verdict on Thommen’s (2017) claims is not absolute. Putting aside slurs for the reasons mentioned above, contrary to his claims classical expressives do display filterability. But at the same time, this filterability is not as impervious as in the case of ordinary presuppositions, since something projects out nonetheless (as seen by the possibility to challenge the utterances by a metalinguistic variant of HWAM). So it seems that expressives manifest an ambivalent behaviour by being both presupposition- like in one sense (part of them is filtered) and non-presupposition-like in another (part of them projects out).

I will argue that an adequate explanation of the ambivalent behaviour of the data is that expressives are in fact presuppositions, but which are also endowed with some extra properties which are responsible for their non-presuppositional behaviour. These extra properties can be understood in terms of additional meaning which is represented in terms of conditions of use, as preliminarily advocated by Kaplan (1999) and eventually developed in a full-fledged framework by Predelli (2013), to which I turn next.