Abstract

Various theoretical approaches have sought to account for the derogatory impact of ethnic slurs, paradigmatically exemplified by nouns such as ‘Kike or ‘Spic’. Content-based accounts of this derogatory impact hold that it owes to a slur’s conventional content, e.g., semantic content or conventional implicature. Alternatives to such content-based accounts instead argue that the source of a slur’s derogatory impact resides outside its content. According to one family of such alternative approaches, a slur’s derogatory effect derives from facts about its use history, especially facts relating to its use by speakers with hateful views of the slur’s targets. According to prohibitionism, another alternative to content-based accounts, the derogatory impact of using a slur arises from the presence of a social taboo prohibiting the term’s use. This paper discusses how slurs denigrate, focusing primarily on certain multimorphemic slurs in Danish. These multimorphemic slurs, I argue, pose a previously unrecognized problem for history of use accounts. I also briefly argue against prohibitionism and accounts which hold that a slur’s derogatory impact owes to its semantic content. After concluding that the derogatory impact of multimorphemic slurs in Danish cannot owe to history of use, taboo or semantic content, I argue that the evidence supports a conventional implicature account of how these terms denigrate.