Propriedades semânticas das injúrias do Português Brasileiro

Abstract

Among the pejorative expressions of a language, slurs stand out because they target not only a single individual but also a group of individuals based on a characteristic that identifies and/or delineates them. This characteristic makes slurs items with mixed semantic content, as they contribute both to the truth-conditional (descriptive) dimension and to the use-conditional (expressive) dimension. In light of this, the main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the linguistic functioning of slurs in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese (BP). To this end, we employ formal semantics and pragmatics as analytical tools, following a hypothetico-deductive methodology based on BP data. This study provides a historical overview of theoretical developments concerning expressive and descriptive meaning, presents tests based on Potts’s (2005, 2007) working using original data, and also addresses the phenomenon of reappropriation. Given that slurs exhibit specific semantic behavior, several authors have proposed distinct theories to account for them. Therefore, in order to explore the theoretical possibilities regarding slurs, two approaches were selected: Davis and McCready (2020), in “The instability of slurs”, and Orlando and Saab (2020), in “A stereotype semantics for syntactically ambiguous slurs”. We explore the properties of the descriptive and expressive features of slurs, the phenomenon of reappropriation, morphological possibilities such as comparison, intensification, attenuation, and negation, as well as the stereotypes associated with animal-based slurs. Therefore, this study contributes to a field that remains relatively underexplored in Brazilian linguistic research, particularly from formal approaches. By presenting a selection of the most common slurs based on the intuitions of native speakers from the interior of São Paulo, we obtain results of analytical and theoretical interest, while also providing a picture of how prejudices are mobilized and reflected through slurs.