RT list: Kinship Terms: Levi-Strauss Goes Gricean

Well, I wish...
I don't think much has been reserached about the overlap here.
"My aunt's cousin went to that concert" is possibly the most
anthropological Grice gets ('Presupposition and Conversational implicature').
It strikes me that in some Romance languages, father-in-law and
mother-in-law would be, er, too legalistic a description and thus avoided (like the
rats). We would say, "my wife's father", or "my husband's mother", or
lexicalise the thing properly. I suppose in English the option _is_ between, "my
wife's father" and "my father in law". Would there be an implicature
associated with the choice of one over the other? Don't tell me you never call
your father in law 'father' ('in law') because "he ain't my father, you know".
Implicating that via conjunction reduction we would get
 
           he is my father in law
            ___________________
            
           ergo, he is my father and he is in law.
 
Borges was obsessed with 'father'. For one, in his "Dr. Brodie's report"
he, well, reports on Broadie finding it very difficult to translate the
Lord's Prayer ("Padrenostro") into the native language. "They lack a concept of
'father' -- for they cannot associate the seminal fluid instilled by the
male on the female with the birth taking place NINE months later -- they lack
the relevant attention span", Brodie argued.
 
One disimplicature that bothers me slightly is the absence of a term, in
English, to designate, 'children' as an age-neutral thing. Suppose I meet
Levi-Strauss's sons. They are, I assume, in their sixties or seventies now.
So, I would not count them as 'children'. Suppose I'm at a park somewhere in
Burgundy, and cross them. On reporting whom I met, I say,
 
          "I met two children in the park".
 
which would be, at the level of the explicature (what is said) true,
leaving me to disimplicate the explicature one way or other. In a way, the idea
(in the song) of "Nobody's child" is just as otiose.
 
The kinship terms in English are possibly complicated by William the
Conqueror. While grossvater and grossmutter is German for grossfather and
grossmother, I would imagine the 'gross' or 'grand' is a gallicism, 'grandpere',
etc. Surely stress is relevant here: "Grandy is a grand father".
 
The term 'sibling' is possibly a good one to analyse via Grice's
informativeness. I avoid 'sibling' like the rats since I find it rude and imprecise.
I cannot find a context (alla Grice, "Somewhere in the South of France",
to the question, "Where did Levi-Strauss live?") where 'A sibling did' may
do instead of the more informative term.
 
I don't know about 'native' societies, but in modern ones, the step- prefix
 provokes some unwanted implicatures too. Cfr. "I hate plastic flowers" +>
I hate flowers. Ditto, stepmothers, are they mothers? It seems that
strictly they are, although a stickler for good use would distinguish between
step-mother (who is not a mother) and a stepmother who _is_ a mother (cfr.
bluebird, a specific species and "blue bird").
 
Etc.
 
Cheers,
 
J. L. Speranza, Bordighera
Received on Wed Nov 4 18:42:23 2009