ABSTRACT
Some language is expressive; either by the way or primarily, it expresses feelings and/or attitudes. Pejorative language comes in several types. Racial and ethnic slurs provide the richest examples. According to the "received view," a slur is a denoting expression that conventionally implicates a negative belief or attitude in one or another sense of that technical term. There are two general approaches to verbal irony, an "echoic" theory and a pretense theory. Irony requires tacit allusion to some pre-existing belief or attitude, and it expresses a dissociative belief or attitude toward the pre-existing one, but on top of that there is only a loose collection of typical features. Paul Grice contended that irony and sarcasm are simply cases of conversational implicature. The paradigm case of sarcasm is a speaker's uttering a declarative, meaning the opposite of what the sentence means, in an ironic tone, thereby expressing a normative attitude.
