Vol. 44 Nro. 1 (2024)
Articles

Neutral terms used as pejoratives: On a recent proposal by Vicente, Fraser and Castroviejo

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  • Ezequiel Zerbudis
Ezequiel Zerbudis
Departamento de Filosofía, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina / Escuela de Filosofía, Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Rosario, Argentina / Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.e510

Published 2024-05-07

Keywords

  • Pejoratives,
  • Metaphor,
  • Presupposition,
  • Stereotypes
  • Peyorativos,
  • Metáfora,
  • Presuposición,
  • Estereotipos
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

I consider the recent proposal by Vicente, Fraser and Castroviejo, according to which there are (at least) two different kinds of pejorative expressions in Spanish, one of which (the one that makes use of neutral terms used as insults) has not been, according to them, sufficiently noticed or studied in the literature. Even if I think that the distinction drawn is important, I suggest an alternative explanation of the phenomenon, according to which the use of these terms as insults has to be understood as metaphoric uses of the terms, and the generic pejorative content they convey has to be understood in terms of general phenomena involved in metaphoric interpretation and presupposition accommodation.

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