RT list: Non-sentential utterances, logical form, explicatures (e.g. in poetry)

 
In the course of a communicative process, the steps that happen when one perceives a linguistic communicative act are:

(1) One aims at finding out what its deep structure is (by mentally creating a set of phrase structure rules with access to a lexicon)

(2) Subsequently, its S structure is arrived at (by adopting the necessary movement possibilities). This triggers almost simultaneously the following two sub-processes:

(3.a) By finding out what deletions can be done, one arrives at the surface structure of the linguistic communicative act.

(3.b) One arrives at its logical form which is the first step to achieve a semantic interpretation.

(4) One extracts the explicatures of that semantic interpretation, thereby understanding what the proposition of the act is.

(5) Finally, one draws inferentially all the implicatures that fit the occasion, and so, eventually, one understands the message communicated

In order to understand a coded linguistic message you have to do a lot of work in the code before trying to understand it. I am sure we are able to find a phrase structure to the poem. What we may perhaps not be able to do is to match the phrase structure terminal elements with lexicon elements for here is precisely where e.e.cummings is violating the English code --for a purpose, of course!

What its logical form should be like is debatable, and so is the semantic interpretation (note that I am not saying those two steps do not exist! They do, of course). Therefore, it is difficult (but not impossible) to derive its explicatures. Finally, if I am right, most of the interpretative work needs to be done at the implicature level.

José Luis Guijarro
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Universidad de Cádiz
11002 Cádiz, España (Spain)
tlf: (34) 956-011.613
fax: (34) 956-015.505
Received on Sat Feb 12 17:57:14 2011