Thanks to Christoph for his interesting comments.
JL:
"It seems we can loosely speak of syntactic "disambiguation" here ["old
books and maps"] 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", for that matter".
Christoph:
"Why should scope ambiguities be different from lexical ambiguities as far
as pragmatic interpretation is concerned? I don't see the point: both
phenomena impact the proposition conveyed by an utterance, i.e. it's
explicature, and both have to be disambiguated pragmatically. Although in
your example, 'old books and maps', this process can be helped in oral
communication by the use of intonation/pause."
I guess I was (and partly still am) confused by the different concepts of
"polysemy" and "ambiguity". It was I think JD Atlas who favours the view
that the Gricean programme is best interpreted as prooposing UNIGUITY (or
monguity, I forget - I prefer the latter term) PLUS Implicature.
In this case, UNIGUITY opposes to POLYSEMY. The locus classicus, and within
my special focus of interest, the logical connectives, the idea that - as
held in Oxford e.g. by LJ Cohen, of Queen's, if not by the early Strawson of
"An Intro to Logical Theory", or earlier still, by Ryle in a number of
essays - that "and" has (at least) two meaning (and is thus ambiguous or
multiguous, or polyguous) - "and = &" (The Russellian interpretation
favoured by Grice), and "and = and then" (or, to use Ryle's example, "He
died and drank the poison", "and as a consequence then").
But I suppose one can see "POLYSEMY" (genuine one, as in the case of Grice's
example, "vice", and "row" - meaning row in a river and row of chairs,
coming from different Anglo-Saxon roots) as just *one* special type of
ambiguity - After all, according to Wm. Empson (and we have been talking
here of the legacy of I. A. Richards) there were SEVEN!
Interestingly (for me, but I have to revise Grice's arguments in detail),
when Grice deals with his Modified Occam's razor (in "Further notes") - as
applied to the alleged to meanings of "or" (inclusive and exclusive - he
does mention the word "ambiguity" if not "polysemy". Also, when in "Meaning
Revisited" (also repr. in Studies in the Way of Words), he discusses whether
there are really two "senses" of "meaning" (natural and non-natural) he also
appeals to the Modified Occam's Razor to conclude that there is just one
meaning and, perhaps, different usages.
One should consider that for Frege, as much as terms (like "vice", "row",
"meaning", "bank") or predicates may be have to have senses, propositions
are also said to have both sense and reference. I forget what Frege thought
the sense of a proposition was, but I recall he thought the reference of a
proposition was a truth value. (Dummett's book on Frege was too thick
(literally) for me. :)).
On the other hand, and back to Grice, there's the maxim, "avoid ambiguity"
(under the Fourth and Last Category of Manner of perspicuity), but the two
examples he offers there (Wm Blake's poem, and "Peccavi") could hardly be
said to deal with polysemy. The first (Blake's poem) seems to be a case of
syntactic scope or parsing, and the latter is so contrived, that I would
hardly call it "conversational". It refers to an historical event, as my
Oxford Dict of Quotations shows).
In all muddled thoughts, my ideas have, most recently, been influenced by
the English computational linguist Adam Kilgariff's PhD thesis on "Polysemy"
(U Sussex, Brighton), and his article "I don't believe in word senses", and
by LR Horn's dictum, "Do not spit if you can lump" - which Horn applies less
liberally than I myself do!
As I recall, Sperber/Wilson's first example of "disambiguation" (in their
Pragamtics Microfiche essay of Grice repr. in P. Werth) concerned the item
"bank". I have not analysed THAT item in due detail, since, being an
etymologist extraordinaire, I find it difficult to find the two SENSES or
meanings of "bank". Italian blooded as I am, I find that they are rather two
"usages" of the same word - as imported into the English language! (As Eve
Sweester would say, a diachronic study of "bank" would show that what is at
play is really a figurative extension of one onl original sense into
multiple uses, I suppose).
Best,
JL
Bs.As, Arg.
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