A naive question from a naive philosopher of language.
RT considers that disambiguation is one of the 3 ways (along with reference
assignment and semantic enrichment) of pragmatic intrusion or penetration in
the constitution of an "explicature". Now, for Grice, disambiguation, it
seems, concerns really ambiguous (or polysemous) words, such as "vice", and
"row", i.e. words which derive from non-cognate roots. I.e., not his
favoured type of monoguous words that respected his modified Occam's razor
("do not multiply senses beyond necessity").
Now, what about expressions of the type of
1. old books and maps.
as meaning either
2. old (books and maps).
or
3. (old books) and maps.
It seems we can loosely speak of syntactic "disambiguation" here in terms of
scope (and thus leading to the constitution of an "explicature") but surely
no strict lexical or semantic "polysemy" is involved, and thus, I'm not sure
if the phenomenon involves a case of standard Gricean implicature or even a
RT "explicature".
Myself, I'm happy, with Grice, in dealing with ambiguity (as in his maxim,
"avoid ambiguity"), as involving, primarily, polysemy only rather than this
kind of "alternate syntactic parsings" (Although his discussion of "avoid
ambiguity" involve the syntactic ambiguity of a poem by Wm Blake, which does
not really concern different "senses". Is the notion of truth-condition
general enough to deal with all this. Provided my hasty notes, may sense -
any comment?
Thanks for any leads,
JL
(Mr)
Bs.As.Arg.
jls@netverk.com.ar
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 23 2001 - 00:28:37 GMT