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knows that the Italophobic content associated with ‘wop’ is not to be ascribed to Jane but to Mary. In other words, in (23) and (24), the projective contents—namely, that Italian people are bad and that things that are sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries are bad—do not have to be ascribed to Jane. Mary’s utterances are at least compatible with Jane lacking any negative attitude towards Italians and sexually explicit things (attitudes that would be ascribed only to Mary).

      In conclusion, in Tonhauser et al.’s (2013) classification, both slurs and thick terms would belong to ‘class B,’ the class of expressions that (i) give rise to projective content; (ii) do not have a strong contextual felicity requirement; and (iii) do not have an obligatory local effect. It is noteworthy that this category includes items that have been analyzed in the literature in terms of conventional implicatures (for instance, appositives) and expressions that have been analyzed in terms of presuppositions (for instance, personal pronouns and possessive noun phrases). In this book I will not discuss whether Tonhauser et al.’s (2013) proposal succeeds in satisfactorily accounting for all kinds of projective content (in particular, I have some doubts about the strong contextual felicity constraint), but one reason to keep using the labels ‘presupposition’ and ‘presuppositional trigger,’ rather than ‘projective content’ and ‘class B trigger,’ is to deploy the set of tools provided by the theory of presupposition, including the notions of common ground, accommodation, failure, rejection, complicity and so on.

1.2.2 Rejection

      In addition to projection, a further interesting property of HEs is that speakers cannot reject their evaluative content through mere denial (Väyrynen 2009, 2013 for thick terms, McCready 2010, Croom 2011, Camp 2013, 2018, Jeshion 2013a, 2013b for slurs). Consider this dialogue:

      1 25.A.Madonna’s show was lewd.B1.No, it wasn’t lewd.B2.Well, the show was indeed sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries, but there’s nothing bad in this.B3.Madonna’s show wasn’t lewd, because there is no such thing.

      A and B disagree about the application of the predicate ‘lewd’ to Madonna’s show: B1 grants that some things are sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries and bad because of that, but thinks that Madonna’s show is not among such things. In contrast, B2 and B3 reject the very idea that being sexually explicit beyond conventional boundaries can be bad per se: B2 retrieves, articulates and rejects what A’s utterance presupposes, while B3 employs a metalinguistic negation. This metalinguistic strategy recalls Oscar Wilde’s famous reply in his trial (Foldy 1997: 8):

      1 26.Carson: Do you consider that10 blasphemous?Oscar Wilde: (. . .) the word ‘blasphemous’ is not a word of mine.

      The same happens with slurs:

      1 27.A.Madonna is a wop.B.No, she isn’t.

      B’s denial is not particularly effective in targeting the evaluative content of A’s utterance, or is at least ambiguous between saying that Madonna is not Italian and refusing to accept A’s utterance on evaluative grounds.¹¹ It can be very tricky to respond to slurring utterances in a way that does not take their derogatory content on board. It is even more complicated than it is for thick terms, mainly because of the interplay between multiple factors. Consider these exchanges (from the COCA):

      1 28.A.I understand Black culture. I grew up around black people all my life. If the truth be told, I probably know niggers better than you, Monsieur Delacroix.B.I would prefer you not use that word in my presence.

      2 29.A.You a fag?B.(. . .) I’m a homosexual.

      3 30.A.I heard he was a fag (. . .)B.Historians don’t generally put it quite that way, but yes, da Vinci was a homosexual.

      The strategies employed in (28)–(30) do not contemplate the articulation of the implicit content: the speakers either prohibit the use of the slur altogether or correct it by substituting it with a non-derogatory counterpart. In pedagogical contexts, on the other hand, where people explain how to react to slurring utterances, we can find the proper articulations of the derogatory content of slurs (which are harder to find in standard exchanges):

      1 31.What you just said was really inappropriate because you are implying that there is something wrong with being gay or lesbian when there isn’t.12

      Why do speakers avoid articulating the presupposed content of slurs in typical conversations? For one thing, there is a crucial difference between rejecting descriptive and evaluative presuppositions. Consider (32) and (34) and their presuppositions π₃₂ and π₃₄. From now on, I use ‘?’ before an utterance to signal that it is odd or infelicitous, ‘??’ to signal that it is strongly infelicitous, and ‘*’ when it is redundant.

      1 32.Lila stopped doing yoga.

      2 π32.Lila used to do yoga.

      3 33.Hey, wait a minute, I didn’t know Lila used to do yoga!

      4 34.You finally realize you were dating a loser.

      5 π34.You were dating a loser.

      6 35.? Hey, wait a minute, I didn’t know that I was dating a loser!

      7 36.Hey, you shouldn’t talk like that about my ex.

The presupposition conveyed by (32) describes a state of affairs (Lila used to do yoga), whereas the one that (34) triggers expresses a value judgment (the interlocutor’s ex is a loser). Imagine that in both of the conversations where (32) and (34) occur, the interlocutors do not share the triggered presupposition, nor are they willing to accept it. While it would be appropriate to respond to (32) along the lines of ‘Hey, wait a minute, I didn’t know that . . .’¹³ (as in 33), such answers are not optimal for rejecting non-shared evaluative content (as we see in 35). If the speaker of (34) takes for granted that his interlocutor’s ex is a loser (even though this presupposition is not shared), the addressee cannot reply with something along the lines of ‘Hey, wait a minute, I didn’t know that my ex is a loser.’¹⁴ Something like (36) would be more appropriate.

      The take-home message is that when HEs introduce an evaluative presupposition, the question is not whether the conversation’s participants already believed it, but rather whether they are willing to accept it or not. In general, the ‘Hey, wait a minute, I didn’t know that . . .’ schema does not work well with evaluative contents, and this could make the strategies of articulation more complicated.

      There are further factors that make the articulation of evaluative presuppositions particularly hard, especially where slurs are concerned. For one thing, it is both cognitively and socially costly to retrieve, explicitly articulate and reject a presupposition in a conversation (see Chilton 2004, 64); it is more convenient to just reject the use of a term rather than articulating the associated presupposition. Furthermore, speakers are not willing to bear the costs of articulating and rejecting the presupposed content, unless they deem it necessary (for instance, when the question under discussion is precisely why it is bad to use a slur, as in pedagogical contexts). Lastly, slurs are censored in most public contexts and their use can be prosecuted.¹⁵ It is only to be expected that when speakers want to reject a slurring term, they opt for a meta-linguistic solution, thus avoiding any involvement with that kind of language: they’d rather forbid the use of the term, or substitute it with a non-loaded counterpart, than explicitly articulate the presupposed content.

1.2.3 An Alternative Explanation of Projection

In the previous sections, I proposed to account for the projective behavior of slurs and thick terms by relying on well-known features of presuppositions. This explanation of the projection of the evaluative content does not rely on the

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