The semantics and pragmatics of slurs and thick terms

In this thesis I develop a uniform account of slurs and thick terms in terms of presuppositions. I argue that slurs and thick terms – that were mainly studied by different disciplines – belong to the same class of ‘hybrid evaluatives’. My work is a contribution in filling the gap between the research on thick terms on the one hand and the research on slurs on the other, by showing that the mechanism underlying slurs and thick terms is one and the same and that the phenomenal differences that one can observe depend on the peculiarities of their descriptive content. In Part I, I define what counts as ‘hybrid evaluative’ and present my presuppositional account. Part II is a critical review of some alternative theories that have been put forward to account for slurs and thick terms respectively. In Part III, I propose a uniform account of two particular uses of slurs and thick terms that have been treated as independent so far, namely Appropriation of Slurs and Variability of thick terms.