The secret life of slurs from the perspective of reported speech

Abstract

Research on reported speech is old, but scholars working in this field are inclined to see its roots in Davidson’s (1968) paratactic account of indirect reports. Although Davidson aimed at a ‘truth-conditional’ theory of indirect reports which could challenge ideational, use, and psychological theories, his paratactic view—of which the backbone was the notion of ‘samesaying’—motivated a good number of scholars to search for adequate accounts of indirect reports in truth-conditional semantics. Ever since then, research on reported speech gathered size and momentum, and resulted in a wealth of knowledge—which has, in turn, made it hard for people not versed in the field to fully appreciate it. This paper brings scholarly literature on reported speech to bear on slurs and reveals their secret life by dissecting them in the light of reported speech