“We could shoot him…”

Abstract In everyday dialogue, people often say things that may be or are taken as offensive by their hearers. Whether or not these utterances are actually taken as offensive is highly context sensitive. Particularly important are social aspects such as the personae of the speaker and audience. Different groups of listeners have access to — and indeed embrace — different background assumptions and entertain different attitudes with regard to these. We consider such assumptions to be Aristotelian topoi and a set of topoi significant for a particular group in a particular context to be a topoplex . In this paper we present three real world examples of supposedly humorous and potentially offensive utterances. Our analysis is compatible with an established theory of dialogue semantics which formalises topoi as mechanisms for common sense reasoning that arise from specific interactional experiences.