![]() The reference to a previous tenant makes it most likely that the property is rented not owned. Although ‘she’ could be a girl-child, the second sentence quoted makes her more likely to be adult. The time is the present as determined by additional co-text, which will also most probably offer more information about the identity of ‘she’ and the location. This evokes a world in which ‘she’ was barefoot outside in the back yard drowsing in the sun there is an implicature that the doorbell rang and she went through the cramped kitchen, with its tiles she probably doesn’t like, to find out who is ringing the doorbell. The back door leads to a poky kitchen, tiled brightly in the taste of the previous tenant. ![]() Take the following:ĭoorbell! She stumbles through the grass barefoot, sun-huddled, drowsy. Then there is the world and time evoked in the utterance. These provide certain aspects of context. Every utterance occurs in some time and place (a world-time pair) and it is interpreted (if at all) at a world-time pair. Elsewhere Recanati says that sentences ‘carry schematic meanings which only determine truth-evaluable contents in the context of a speech act’ (Recanati 2013: 61). Recanati ( 2005: 1): ‘sentences carry content only in the context of a speech act’. All language occurs in some context or another cf. The primary function of language is for human beings to communicate with one another and that is achieved though utterance of spoken, written, or signed texts. (12) is assumed true if it is raining wherever Harry is located (or perhaps interested in 4) and that event makes him happy. A model of the world (and time) spoken of is the content of a mental space which can be readily associated in a variety of ways with other worlds (and times) occupying other mental spaces.Īllan ( 1981, 2011b) drew attention to the significance of salience in context to make the relevantly different interpretations of the animal nouns in sentences (1)–(6). 1 The world spoken of is a mental model of an actual or recalled or imagined world it is a possible world accessible from the world spoken in (see Allan 2001 for more on this). Because worlds spoken of are revealed through language, they all have some association with the world the speaker/writer inhabits, the world spoken in. Each ‘world’ is in fact part of a world-time pair, such that the word world invokes a paired time. the meaning of ε in the context of the utterance in which it occurs, υ). We see that the basic semantic content invariably contributes to the functional (compositional) meaning, but that pragmatic input from connotations is essential in determining the truth value of the utterance in which nigger appears.Ĭontext κ is (a) the world spoken of, constituted by the topic of discourse revealed by expression ε’s co-text (what is and has been said) (b) if ε is a constituent of utterance υ, such that ε ⊆ υ, κ is also the situation in which υ is expressed, which includes what is known about the speaker/writer and the perlocutionary effect of this and similar uses of ε-we might call this situation of utterance ‘the world spoken in’ finally, (c) there is a corresponding situation of interpretation in which the hearer/reader seeks to understand ε ⊆ υ (i.e. I examine the place and function of the uses of nigger within the context of the film, ‘Pulp Fiction’, to demonstrate that the affective quality of a linguistic expression should never be judged without taking account of its intended perlocutionary effect within the context in which it is uttered. I discuss the composition of context and the semantics and connotations of nigger. Lastly I consider the tricky situation where a white uses the term nigger to a black friend, not as a term of address and not as a slur either, I argue. ![]() Another instance is where black gangster millionaire Marcellus Wallace, after handing white boxer Butch Coolidge money to go down in the fifth round, tells him ‘You’re my nigger’ to which Butch replies ‘Certainly appears so’. As with many slurs, in-group usage by people who might themselves have been slurred with the term by out-groupers, nigger is used among African Americans to express camaraderie. In this paper I discuss several occurrences of the N word in Quentin Tarantino’s film ‘Pulp Fiction’. Eradicationists confuse the form of the word with its frequent use as a slur that discredits, slights, smears, stains, besmirches people of black African descent. For many people the word itself is a slur no matter what the context, and such people argue for its eradication from the English language. Use of the word nigger is very often castigated as slurring the referent, but this ignores the context of use. ![]()
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