Re:
1. Edward looked at his red beard in the tableknife.
Then Edward and Pia went to Sweden, to the farm.
(D. Barthelme)
Barbara wrote, inter alia,
"I'm puzzled over where we get the expectation that conjoined sentences will
describe similar events. Is
it from an assumption schema? Is it because conjoining the trivial with the
significant does not yield enough cognitive effects?"
My mind, like Barthelme's narrator, is a bit disturbed as I write this, so
apologies for nonsequiturs, etc. In (1) of course you'll have to distinguish
between the truth-conditions, the explicature, and the conversational
implicature. Grice had problems with "then". He thought
2. If p, q
was perfectly explainable via "uniguity (material implication "->") plus
implicature", while
3. If p, THEN q
was not (Logic & Conversation, Conditionals, in Studies in the Way of
Words). Then, there's the usual conversational implicature (via "be
orderly") of
4. p & q
(Sometimes merely "p . q", i.e. "p period q". I don't think the "." is a
FULL stop there since it does not create a new paragraph).
as implicating a temporal/causal sequence
5. p and THEN [later] q
I guess the Anglo-Saxon particle "then" was (and it IS still) tricky.
Truth-conditionally, it doesn't seem to be any constraint of the type you
suggest for the use of "then". But THEN English is not my Mother Tongue. It
is my Father Tongue. In (1) it merely seems to mean, truth-conditionally,
"later". ("I take off my trousers. Only *then* I get into the bed" ("Then"
can also mean "not-now" (more generally) as in the idiom "now and THEN" -
which does NOT mean, "now and LATER", but quite the opposite, "now and
EARLIER". English!
Also, and perhaps more relevantly (:)), how do you know Edward's looking at
his read beard in the tableknife was "trivial".
Or are you suggesting his going to a Swedish farm with Pia was trivial?
I think his looking at his read beard on the tableknife is terrorific and a
v. effective way of starting a short story. The man must be a killer, and he
obviously cannot cope with his Celtic (or Viking) ancestry ("red beard").
It's obvious that his retreating to a Swedish farm (where this Viking really
belongs) must be an escapism from his murdering instincts. I hope Pia is safe.
Keep us posted!
JL
BA, Arg.
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