Pejoratives as Fiction

Fictional terms have null extensions, and in this regard pejorative terms are a species of fictional term: although there are Jews, there are no kikes. The central consequence of the Moral and Semantic Innocence (MSI) view of Hom and May (2013) is that for pejoratives, null extensionality is the semantic realization of the moral fact that no one ought to be the target of negative moral evaluation solely in virtue of their group membership. In having null extensions, pejorative terms are much like mythological terms like “unicorn horn” that express concepts with empty extensions: people who believed the mythology were misled into thinking that ordinary objects (i.e., whale tusks) were magical objects, and pejorative terms work likewise. In this chapter, the consequences of this parallelism are explored, with an eye to criticisms of MSI. The chapter concludes with meta-semantic reflections on the nature of word meanings.

‘CRY ME A RIVER’: METAPHORIC HYPERBOLES IN THE INTERFACE BETWEEN DISCOURSE AND COGNITION

This paper aims at analyzing metaphor as a frequent semantic realization of “the language of excess” (WEBB, 1993), i.e., hyperbole. The hypothesis to be explored is twofold: firstly, from a discursive perspective, hyperbole aims at transcending a language repertoire available for expressing intensity and gradability, and as a corollary of that, subjectivity and evaluation. In this respect, metaphor, both conventional and novel, realizes, linguistically, this intensity with both discursive and cognitive effects, by drawing elements of the source domain which serve this dual purpose. The second hypothesis to guide our research refers to the conceptual nature of the vehicle term, in other words, the metaphoric hyperbole used. Our suggestion is that, within a conceptual scale involving elements of a particular frame, the one which is selected is the prototype of that category, which is used metaphorically with hyperbolic effects. The theoretical framework underlying the research involves the concepts of hyperbole, as defined by Claridge (2011), graduation (MARTIN; WHITE, 2005), conceptual metaphor (LAKOFF; JONHSON, 1980) and prototype (ROSCH, 1979, 1983). A brief analysis of the conventional hyperbolic expression cry me a river, with examples drawn form a general corpus, will illustrate the discussion presented in the paper.