Paving the road to hellthe Spanish word menas as a case study

  1. Bordonaba Plou, David 1
  2. Torices Vidal, Jos´é Ramón
  1. 1 Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile
Revista:
Daimon: revista internacional de filosofía
  1. Pérez Navarro, Eduardo (coord.)
  2. Frápolli Sanz, María José (coord.)

ISSN: 1130-0507,  1989-4651

Año de publicación: 2021

Título del ejemplar: Monográfico sobre «Expressing Hatred: The Political Dimension of Expressives»

Número: 84

Páginas: 47-62

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.6018/DAIMON.482011 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDIGITUM editor

Otras publicaciones en: Daimon: revista internacional de filosofía

Objetivos de desarrollo sostenible

Resumen

Menas es un término que ha ganado notoriedad en la actual escena política española. Aunque el término tenía un uso neutro en su origen, ya que es un acrónimo de “menores extranjeros no acompañados”, recientemente ha evolucionado a un término con claras connotaciones negativas. Este artículo explora qué tipo de término es menasactualmente. Específicamente, examinaremos si menas es un slur o un TESNI, es decir, un término étnico/social neutro usado como insulto. Primero, señalamos las características más definitorias de ambos tipos de términos. Después, por medio de análisis sobre corpus lingüísticos, mostramos que menas exhibe las características más definitorias de los TESNI. Acabamos discutiendo la posible evolución del término, señalando que, aunque el término tiene los rasgos de los TESNI, existen dos posibles escenarios. Por un lado, el término puede conservar sus usos neutros y de este modo seguir siendo un TESNI. Por otro lado, los usos neutros pueden desaparecer y así el término acabar convir-tiéndose en un slur.

€ Ver financiación

Información de financiación

Abstract: Menas is a term that has attracted a great deal of attention on the political scene in Spain at present. Although the term had a neutral usage originally, being an acronym for unaccompanied foreign minors, it has recently evolved into a term with clear negative connotations. This article explores what kind of term menas is today. Specifically, we will examine whether menas is a slur or an ESTI, an ethnic/social term used as an insult. First, we point out the most defining characteristics of both types of terms. Then, using analyses on linguistic corpora, we show that menas exhibits the most defining characteristics of ESTIs. We end by discussing the possible evo- Resumen: Menas es un término que ha ganado notoriedad en la actual escena política española. Aunque el término tenía un uso neutro en su origen, ya que es un acrónimo de “menores extranjeros no acompañados”, recientemente ha evolucionado a un término con claras connotaciones negativas. Este artículo explora qué tipo de término es menas actualmente. Específicamente, examinaremos si menas es un slur o un TESNI, es decir, un término étnico/social neutro usado como insulto. Primero, señalamos las características más definitorias de ambos tipos de términos. Después, por medio de análisis sobre corpus lingüísticos, mostramos que menas exhibe las características más definitorias Recibido: 31/05/2021. Aceptado: 02/07/2021. * This publication resulted (in part) from research supported by CONICYT/FONDECYT/POSTDOCTO-RADO/ N° Proyecto 3180096, by MINECO under the grant FPI/BeS-2014-067584 and the research project PID2019-109764RB-I00, by the Regional Government of Andalusia under the research projects B–HUM-459-UGR18 and P18-FR-2907, and by the University of Granada under a “Contrato Puente” fellowship and the excellence unit FiloLab-UGR UCE.PPP2017.04. We are grateful to the editors for making this special issue possible, and to Agustín Vicente and the two anonymous referees for their fruitful comments. ** David Bordonaba-Plou is a FONDECYT postdoctoral researcher at the Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile. Contact: davidbordonaba@gmail.com. His most recent publications are Bordonaba, D. (2021) “Metalinguis-tic negotiations and two senses of taste”, Diametros, 18(67), 1–20, and Bordonaba, D. (2021), “Cognitive penetration and taste predicates: Making an exception to the tule”, Filosofia Unisinos 22(1), 12–20. *** José Ramón Torices is a postdoctoral researcher belonging to the excellence unit FiloLab-UGR and the research group Filosofía y Análisis (HUM-975). Contact: jrtorices@gmail.com. His most recent publications are Torices, J. R. (2021), “Understanding dogwhistle politics”, Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science, DOI: 10.1387/theoria.22510, and D. Bordonaba, V. Fernández Castro and J. R. Torices (forthcoming), “The political turn: Analytic philosophy as philosophical activism”, in D. Bordonaba, V. Fernández Castro and J. R. Torices (eds.), The Political Turn in Analytic Philosophy: Reflec-tions on Social Injustice and Oppression, Berlin: De Gruyter. **** The names of the two authors are in alphabetical order. Both authors have contributed equally to the paper.

Financiadores

Referencias bibliográficas

  • Anderson, L., & Lepore, E. (2013), “Slurring words”, Noûs 47(1), pp. 25-48.
  • Baker, P. (2006), Using corpora in discourse analysis, London, New York: Continuum.
  • Baker P., Gabrielatos C. & McEnery T. (2013), Discourse analysis and media studies. The representation of Islam in the British press, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Biber et al. (1999), Grammar of spoken and written English language, London: Longman.
  • Blakemore, D. (2015), “Slurs and expletives: a case against a general account of expressive meaning”, Language Sciences 52, pp. 22-35.
  • Bluhm, R. (2013), “Don’t ask, look! Linguistic corpora as a tool for conceptual analysis”, in: Hoeltje, M., Spitzley, T. y Spohn, W. (eds.): Was dürfen wir glauben? Was sollen wir tun? Sektionsbeiträge des achten internationalen Kongresses der Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie, e.V. DuEPublico, pp. 7-15.
  • Bluhm, R. (2016), “Corpus analysis in philosophy”, in: Hinton, M. (ed.), Evidence, experiment and argument in linguistics and philosophy of language, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 91-109.
  • Bolinger, R. J. (2017), “The pragmatics of slurs”, Noûs 51(3), pp. 439-462.
  • Bowker, L. & Pearson, J. (2002), Working with specialised language: a practical guide to using corpora. London, New York: Routledge.
  • Camp, E. (2013), “Slurring perspectives”, Analytic Philosophy 54(3), pp. 330-349.
  • Castroviejo, E., Fraser, K. & Vicente, A. (2020), “More on pejorative language: insults that go beyond their extension”, Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02624-0.
  • Caton, J. N. (2020), “Using linguistic corpora as a philosophical tool”, Metaphilosophy, 51(1), pp. 51-70.
  • Cepollaro, B. (2015), “In defense of a presuppositional account of slurs”, Language Sciences 52, pp. 36-45.
  • Croom, A. M. (2013), “How to do things with slurs: studies in the way of derogatory words”, Language and Communication 33, pp. 177-204.
  • Croom, A. M. (2015), “The semantics of slurs: A refutation of coreferentialism”. Ampersand: An International Journal of General and Applied Linguistics 2, pp. 30-38.
  • Desagulier G. (2017), Corpus linguistics and statistics with R. Introduction to quantitative methods in linguistics, Cham: Springer.
  • Gablasova, D., Brezina, V. & McEnery, T. (2017), “Collocations in corpus‐based language learning research: identifying, comparing, and interpreting the evidence”, Language Learning, 67(S1), pp. 155-179.
  • Gries S. T. (2017), Quantitative corpus linguistics with R. A practical introduction, New York: Routledge.
  • Hansen, N. & Chemla, E. (2015), “Linguistic experiments and ordinary language philosophy”, Ratio, 28(4), pp. 422-445.
  • Hansen, N. (2015), “Experimental philosophy of language”, in: Oxford Handbooks Online, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Hansen et al. (2019), “A corpus study of “know”: on the verification of philosophers’ frequency claims about language”, Episteme. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2019.15.
  • Hinton M. (2020), “Corpus linguistics methods in the study of (meta)argumentation”, Argumentation. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09533-z.
  • Hom, C. (2008), “The semantics of racial epithets”, Journal of Philosophy 105(8), pp. 416-440.
  • Hunston S. (2002), Corpora in applied linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Jeshion, R. (2013), “Slurs and stereotypes”, Analytic Philosophy 54(3), pp. 314-329.
  • Kilgarriff, A. & Renau, I. (2013), “esTenTen, a vast web corpus of Peninsular and American Spanish, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 95, pp. 12-19.
  • McEnery T., & Hardie A. (2012), Corpus linguistics: method, theory and practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Moreno-Zurita, A., & Pérez-Navarro, E. (MS), “Beyond the conversation: the pervasive danger of slurs”.
  • Nunberg, G. (2018), “The Social Life of Slurs”. in: D. Fogal, D. Harris & M. Moss (eds.), New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, pp. 237-295.
  • Pearson, J. (1998), Terms in context, Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  • Popa-Wyatt, M. & Wyatt, J. L. (2018), “Slurs, roles and power”, Philosophical Studies 175(11), pp. 2879-2906.
  • Strickland, B. & Suben, A. (2013), “Experimenter philosophy: the problem of experimenter bias in experimental philosophy”, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3(3), pp. 457-467.
  • Tallant, J. & Andow, J. (2020), “English language and philosophy”, in: S. Adolphs & D. Knight (eds.), The Routledge handbook of English language and digital humanities. Routledge, pp. 440-455.
Fuente de los datos: Dialnet