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(2013) Varieties of tone, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
If we compare the sentences ‘This dog howled the whole night’ and ‘This cur howled the whole night’, we find that the thought is the same. The first sentence tells us neither more nor less than does the second. But whilst the word ‘dog’ is neutral as between having pleasant or unpleasant associations, the word ‘cur’ certainly has unpleasant rather than pleasant associations and puts us rather in mind of a dog with a somewhat unkempt appearance. Even if it is grossly unfair to the dog to think of it in this way, we cannot say that this makes the second sentence false. True, anyone who utters this sentence speaks pejoratively, but this is not part of the thought expressed (1897: 140).
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Kortum, R. D. (2013). Expressive terms: pejoratives and honorifics, in Varieties of tone, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 102-118.
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