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Abstract:
Since Kaplan’s seminal (unpublished) 2005 manuscript, “The meaning of ‘Ouch’ and ‘Oops’”, derogatory language came to the philosophy of language forum. One of the main questions concerns how the distinction between a slur like “Boche” and its neutral counterpart “German” enters the semantics/pragmatics debate. In this thesis, I will attempt to capture the offensiveness conveyed by the utterance of a slur using Grice’s notion of pragmatic implicatures. Slurs will be explained in exploiting Grice’s notion of generalized conversational implicatures within the pluri-propositionalist framework inspired by Perry. Along this line, we can maintain a clear-cut distinction between semantics and pragmatics phenomena.