Slurs and Pragmatic Competition

Abstract Differences in informativeness regarding truth-conditional and presuppositional content elicit scalar inferences. Many sentences carry not-at-issue, non-presupposed content, e.g. conventional implicatures. This raises the question whether differences in informativeness due to differences in CI content license scalar inferences as well (let us call them anti-conventional implicatures). In previous work, I have shown that certain expressions do license anti-conventional implicatures, and I accounted for the data by postulating a pragmatic principle called Maximize conventional implicatures!, which directs the speaker to use the alternative with the stronger conventional implicatures among those that are formal alternatives and are contextually relevant. Slurs pose a challenge for this view, since they do not seem to license scalar inferences. In this article, I advance an explanation of the data about slurs that is compatible with Maximize conventional implicatures! The gist of the argument hinges upon the notion of linguistic markedness. It has been argued that scalar inferences are blocked if linguistic markedness is not held fixed. I contend that slurs are sociolinguistically marked, and that this is what accounts for the fact that the use of a slur’s neutral counterpart does not license the expected scalar expressive inference.