Sociolinguistic Variation, Slurs, and Speech Acts

In this paper, I argue that the ‘social meanings’ associated with sociolinguistic variation put pressure on the standard philosophical conception of language, according to which the foremost thing we do with words is exchange information. Drawing on parallels with the explanatory challenge posed by slurs and pejoratives, I argue that the best way to understand social meanings is to think of them in speech act theoretic terms, and I develop a distinctive form of pluralism about the kinds of performances realized by means of sociolinguistic variants

Parallels · Pluralism (philosophy) · Sociolinguistics · Speech act · Variation (astronomy) · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy