Norms of Behavior and Emotions in the Discourse Structure

Abstract

There are many ways in which a speaker might convey offensive or derogatory social norms of how it is permissible or required to behave or feel. Some argue that speakers thereby include derogatory or offensive content into the conversational context, and appeal to the influential pragmatic frameworks by Stalnaker and Lewis for how to model the structure of this context. However, since these theories are primarily designed to model mutual belief, they seem ill-equipped to accommodate the action-guiding or affective dimensions of derogatory speech. The challenge is to show how these frameworks can be expanded in a way that enables them to explain the way derogatory and offensive language presupposes norms accepted among interlocutors about what actions or attitudes are appropriate. In the first part of this paper, I propose an account that meets this challenge by offering a theory of how the shared conversational background can be updated to include norms of mistreatment that are represented as items on to-do lists (inspired by Portner’s work on the pragmatics of imperatives). In the second part of the paper, I consider whether we should also say that the conversational context includes emotions. I argue that there are ways to accommodate the impact of emotions without assuming that there is a distinct section within the context that represents mutually accepted emotions.