Can morphology inform philosophy? The case of Italian pejoratives as Hybrid Evaluatives

Caterina Lupieri

University of Trieste

This paper examines a set of Italian insults formed through pejorative suffixation applied to socially connoted bases (e.g., donnuccola ‘woman+DIM.DEROG’, poveraccio ‘poor+DEROG’, dottoruncolo ‘doctor+DIM.DEROG’) within the framework of the Presuppositional Account of Hybrid Evaluatives and argues that they can contribute to philosophical theories on slurs and hate speech. The analysis is based on data drawn from ItTenTen20, a large web corpus of contemporary Italian, which were manually annotated and analysed using Excel and R.
The results show that these pejorative constructions display a peculiar combination of a socially identifiable target and an instability of the offence. This instability is linked to shifts in valence of pejorative suffixes, attested in the dataset and related to morphopragmatics effects (Merlini Barbaresi 2015). At the same time, the social nature of the base tends to anchor the offensive interpretation, making it relatively resistant to negation and cancellation.
On this basis, the paper argues that such constructions exhibit intermediate properties between slurs and thick terms. Building on the Presuppositional Account of Hybrid Evaluatives (HE), I propose describing HEs along a continuum, ranging from items with predominantly descriptive content (thick terms) to those with predominantly presupposed evaluative content (slurs). Italian pejorative formations occupy a middle position within this continuum: their derogatory meaning is morphologically explicit, yet the presence of a socially salient target appears to trigger a presuppositional interpretation, making the offence comparatively resistant to negation and cancellation.
Overall, the paper provides corpus-based evidence for refining the theoretical treatment of Hybrid Evaluatives, thus questioning and opening to further research on theories on hate speech.

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