This article develops an account of the social foundations and functions of in-group languages. Drawing on Herbert H. Clark-s theory of communication, we define an in-group language as the communal lexicon proper of a cultural community that forms part of a larger, nested set of cultural communities. On this definition, in-group languages are sets of linguistic conventions that emerge as solutions to the coordination problems faced by their associated cultural communities. We argue that this explains both why in-group languages arise and why they exhibit characteristic social functions: signaling membership in a cultural community, marking boundaries between groups, and reinforcing social cohesiveness within them. We further show that the account provides a natural basis for defining language change restricted to a subgroup of a broader speech community, and for assessing—and partially dissolving—the apparent tension between such subgroup divergence and the assumption that language change is characteristically aimed at a common linguistic good.

The semantics-pragmatics distinction is of great importance within both the philosophy of language and linguistics, but the question of how to really draw this distinction remains disputed. Part of the dispute rests on differing intuitions about the extent to which the context of utterance plays a role in determining the semantic contribution of a given expression. Another part of it stems from the difficulty of accounting for communicative phenomena that appear not to fit neatly on either side of the distinction. In this theoretical context, the present thesis argues for four conclusions: (i) That the currently available empirical evidence on polysemy processing and resolution fails to support a one-representation model of the meanings associated with polysemous expressions. (ii) That the inherent polysemy exhibited by some proper names puts pressure on Kripke’s two main theses about the semantics of proper names. (iii) That the social significance of a slang word is analyzable in terms of the lexical metadata related to it, and the inferences people competent with the word will be disposed to draw on the basis of that metadata. (iv) That slang words are best understood as words that are nonstandard, nontechnical, informal, and part of the in-group language of a social group. These conclusions are of wider importance. Establishing (i) and (ii) mandates rethinking the significance of polysemy vis-à-vis the semantics-pragmatics boundary: Contrary to a widely held view, the phenomenon fails to vindicate any particular way of drawing the semantics-pragmatics boundary and yet, polysemy continues to have bearing on semantic theorizing. Establishing (iii) and (iv) constitutes a major step towards clarifying how the phenomenon of social meaning, which is not easily placed on the semantics-pragmatics boundary, can be integrated into the philosophy of language.

It is well-established within linguistics that slang serves a group-identifying function. In this paper, a new understanding of the notion of lexical metadata is developed to provide a philosophical treatment of said function. The proposed account explains the group-identifying function of slang in terms of certain inferences about a speaker's group affiliations that people competent with a slang word will be disposed to make given the lexical metadata related to the word in question. The resulting view is theoretically simple and may extend to a whole range of linguistic phenomena that speakers utilize to position themselves in social space.

According to the received view in the literature on homonymy and polysemy representation, there is a difference between how polysemes and homonyms are represented in our mental lexicons. More concretely, the received view holds that whereas the meanings associated with a homonymous expression are (mentally) represented in separate lexical entries, the meanings associated with a polysemous expression are represented together in a single lexical entry. It is usually argued that this is the picture that is supported by the growing body of empirical evidence coming from psycholinguistics. Empirical studies of ambiguity processing and resolution consistently show that polysemous expressions enjoy various processing advantages compared to homonyms, and the received view is generally taken to be required in order to explain these results. The aim of this paper is not only to show that this is not the case but also, and more fundamentally, that the received view falls far short of explaining the available data to a sufficient degree. As a result, the received view is caught up in an explanatory dilemma that I dub the Continuum Puzzle. I then claim that the best way to escape this puzzle is to give up the received view’s core thesis in favor of an alternative view consistent with the empirical evidence. Reaching such an alternative will require rejecting the following pervasive but ill-motivated assumption: Differences in ambiguity processing and resolution can only be explained by there being some corresponding differences in the architecture of our mental lexicons.

Slurs are pejorative expressions that derogate individuals or groups on the basis of their gender, race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation and so forth. In the constantly growing literature on slurs, it has become customary to appeal to so-called “neutral counterparts” for explaining the extension and truth-conditional content of slurring terms. More precisely, it is commonly assumed that every slur shares its extension and literal content with a non-evaluative counterpart term. I think this assumption is unwarranted and, in this paper, I shall present two arguments against it. (i) A careful comparison of slurs with complex or thick group-referencing pejoratives lack- ing neutral counterparts shows that these are in fact very hard to distinguish. (ii) Slurs lack the referential stability of their alleged neutral counterparts, which suggests that they are not coreferential. Developing (ii) will involve introducing a new concept which I regard as essential for understanding how slurs behave in natural language: referential flexibility. I shall support my claims by looking at historical and current ways in which slurs and other pejorative terms are used, and I shall argue that both etymological data and new empirical data support the conclusion that the assumption of neutral counterparts not only is unwarranted but obscures our understanding of what slurs are, and what speakers do with them. 

It is well-known that, in Naming and Necessity (1981/1972), Kripke advocates for the view that proper names are rigid designators that do not semantically encode any information about their bearers. It is less well-known that, in the literature on polysemy, some proper names are held to be inherently polysemous (e.g., “France” and “Paris”). This paper reveals a tension between Kripke’s picture and some central semantic hypotheses that have emerged from the polysemy literature. Indeed, it shows that commonly held views about inherent polysemy and the proper names that are held to instantiate it fail to concur with Kripke’s proposal. The conclusion is that inherently polysemous proper names pose a threat to the assumption that Kripke’s semantic theses generalize to all proper names.

Although often overlooked in philosophy, slang has long intrigued linguists as a dynamic and socially significant linguistic phenomenon. This paper seeks to give an account of slang that is theoretically useful, aligned with common intuitions about what distinguishes slang from other linguistic phenomena, as well as conducive to a better understanding of slang’s social significance. It proposes that slang is characteristically nonstandard, nontechnical, informal, and part of the in-group language of a social group. The account agrees with most contemporary views of slang within linguistics, but clarifies and brings key insights together in novel ways. The paper also demonstrates slang’s connection to broader philosophical discussions on socially significant linguistic phenomena, such as slurs and dogwhistles, arguing for its deeper consideration within philosophical inquiry.