TL;DR: The authors argue that expletives have no descriptive content and patterns with smiles, gestures and tone of voice which are used to trigger procedures for the identification of emotional states, whereas slurs have descriptive content -content which provides a means of identifying the group of individuals they are meant to target.

TL;DR: In this paper, an interactional account of illocutionary practice is developed, which is based on the assumption that the force of an act depends on what counts as its interactional effect or, in other words, on the response that it conventionally invites or attempts to elicit.

TL;DR: This article found that taboo expressives and general pejoratives comprise the core of the category of taboo words while slurs tend to occupy the periphery, and the ability to generate taboo language is not an index of overall language poverty.

TL;DR: This paper found that the meanings expressed in grammaticised expressions, such as (spatial) adpositions, are more likely to be similar across languages than meaning expressed in open class lexical items.

TL;DR: This article examined the manifestation and effects of slurs against men and masculinity and found that men may respond with physical aggression when targeted by these slurs, and that men's masculine honor beliefs are associated with their perceptions of slurs as offensive and the ratings of their likelihood of responding physically, especially for slurs that directly challenge their masculinity.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the Distributed Language Approach (DLA) vis-a-vis Dialogism, as it is presented by Per Linell (2009, 2013, etc.).

TL;DR: In particular, it is difficult to transpose the three central bio-ecological concepts of organism, environment, and relationship/interaction to human language, and in his ecological-linguistic work, Haugen wavers between placing the focus on the interaction, on the interrelation, and on the "organism" as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: The authors investigated the use of racial slurs and stereotypes in the workplace and found that they function as symbolic resources that exclude minorities but not whites from opportunities or resources, irrespective of their particular context of use.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the intuitions we have about slurs and assess the difficulties that the main theories encounter in explaining how these terms work in order to identify the phenomena that a satisfactory account of slurs needs to explain.

TL;DR: The authors argue that projects seeking to reclaim slurs have a performative structure that raises particular hazards, and that attempts to re-appropriate slurs can fail to be understood as transgressive acts at all.

TL;DR: This article examined the function of each occurrence of the word nigger within the film script of Quentin Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' and concluded that most occurrences of nigger are uttered by one African-American to or about another in the spirit of camaraderie.

TL;DR: The authors tested four criteria for the distinction between primary vs. secondary grammaticalization in East and mainland Southeast Asian languages, and found that the four criteria work in these languages and can be taken as a good indicator for their cross-linguistic, maybe universal relevance.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore what kind of environmental and social pressures might have fashioned strongly swearing aggressive males during the course of human evolutionary history and examine the evolution of swearing by discussing the possible factors that might have prompted its emergence in our evolutionary background.

TL;DR: The authors introduce a facework scale that captures face-enhancing and face-threatening strategies and combinations thereof, which can explain various uses of terms such as nigger: for example, its use in order to slur or negatively frame another (Croom, 2011); its use (by in-group members) to express affection for or approval of another (Smitherman, 2006); and unsuccessful cases of (re-)appropriation (Bianchi, 2014) such that an utterance meant to build camaraderie between S and T ultimately serves to offend T.

TL;DR: This paper introduced a theory of language descent based on an interplay between inheritance and contact mechanisms of language transmission, emphasizing the alternation between periods of gradual and rapid change in the history of languages, with the assumption that during both types of periods, change is due to language contact.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined what forms the phonological knowledge of T3 sandhi among native Mandarin listeners and asked the question whether there are cognitively based perceptual constraints that relate to T 3 sandhi.

TL;DR: The authors show that minor declarative complementizers are typically associated with the expression of subjectivity and irreality, and they are usually attested in complementation structures in which subjectivity is also at hand (e.g. they are complements to specific predicate types occurring in non-assertive environments).

TL;DR: A typological survey of patterns pertaining to epistemic complementizers, including their cross-linguistic frequency, the meanings they express, and the ways in which they combine into systems involving multiple markers is presented.

TL;DR: The authors argue that Steffensen tends to overstate the differences between dialogism and the distributed language approach (DLA), and argue that the difference is mainly a terminological issue.

TL;DR: The authors examined the contextual fluidities and nuances of racial discourse in a southwestern baked-goods workplace and found that racist comments are often expressed alongside classist and sexist comments by people who simultaneously occupy multiple racial, class, and gender locations.

TL;DR: It is proposed that there are in fact two types of changes that have a grammatical input: one in which the development of a new grammatical function goes together with morphosyntactic reconfiguration, which is true secondary grammaticalization in the sense of Givon (1991), and another in which there is a semantico-functional change.

TL;DR: In this article, an ethnolinguistic analysis of how the space between the head and the body is construed in Scandinavian semantic systems vis-a-vis the semantic system of English is presented.

TL;DR: The authors investigated whether the typically pejorative term slut can lead to positive social consequences when used in the context of a social justice movement and found that women were less likely to endorse common rape myths after being exposed to slut in a supportive (i.e., SlutWalk march) relative to a nondescript context, regardless of the sex of speaker.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a language sciences journal for language sciences, which is published in the journal "Language Sciences" (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2014.10.003

TL;DR: This article investigated the order of antonymy in the Serbian language and found that three-quarters of the antonymous pairs tend to be used in a preferred sequence in text and that there is a strong correlation between anonym sequence in language use and the concept of markedness.

TL;DR: Qualitative and quantitative analyses of expressions describing static topological relations in Frisian, Icelandic, and Norwegian (Bokmal), Swiss German, and Standard German show considerable differences across the languages.

TL;DR: The authors traces the birth of two different pink categories in western Europe and the lexicalization strategies used for these categories in English, German, Bernese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic with the cognate sets pink, rosa, bleikur, lyserod, ceris.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a vademecum on the possibilities and the limits of an experimental approach to the study of slurs and derogatory language and distinguish between off-line and on-line studies and underline the advantages and constraints of both methods.

TL;DR: In this article, a distinction between constructionalization and constructional changes is introduced, whereby a grammaticalization process is conceptualized as a sequence of constructionalisation and specific constructional change.