I'm still trying to figure out a way out of "analytic" examples like "?Some
if not all of the students split off from the crowd", and "?3 if not the 10
cows were culled from the herd". Another analytic poster has already
considered more _streamlined_ cases like "?Some if not all of the peaches
are riper than the others." The idea which is taking shape is that certain
constructions BLOCK the Gricean implicature... (for certain perfectionist
speakers, if not me).
I must thank the offlist replies to my recent posts. Most interesting
examples of, e.g. concession-implicatures in asyndetic contexts, etc. I
would like to focus in this post in something that may relate to
everything. Grice on "therefore". In 'Logic and Conversation' (p.25 of
_Studies in the way of words_), Grice considers:
1. He is an Englishman, he is therefore brave.
Actually, we may try and reproduce Grice's rather more formal typography
and punctuation, and write _that_ -- post-reference assignment -- as:
2. Jones is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave.
((I notice this because I'm overgoing a phase where I see prosody
(intonation and pauses like _that_) as the MAIN test for life and
implicature -- a native speaker is not so much one know knows how to
implicate and use clever words, but one who knows how to make her
utterances nice-flowing. Nobody today would use such convoluted punctuation
as in (2) -- Grice was lecturing in 1967! -- I am reminded that the
original punctuation in, say, the 1870s operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan was:
3. HMS Pinafore; or, the lass that loved a sailor
which, today would come out as
4. HMS Pinafore, or the lass that loved the sailor.
)). Re:
2. Jones is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave.
the interesting thing -- as it applies to RT as discussed by Levinson 2000,
_Presumptive Meanings: the theory of generalised conversational
implicature_ -- seems to be that it's somewhere between the Said and the
Un-Said. In this case, what is UN-SAID for Grice is
5. It is a theorem that (Jones is an Englishman -> Jones is brave)
or something (I can't find the AASCI symbol for "...yields..." as used in
metalogic -- and Levinson on p.xi, which he rather misleadingly paraphrases
as "...entails..." -- but I hope my paraphrase will do!). A rather parallel
particle, which was P. F. Strawson's obsession (in 'If and ->' in
Grandy/Warner 1986) would be:
6. Jones is an Englishman; so, he is brave.
i.e. we seem to be dealing with some sort of _inferrability_ which, Grice
says, is merely IMPLICATED. But as it is, in RT parlance -- as per the
abstract to T Fretheim's forthcoming talk -- "encoded", it is a
_conventional_ implicature. So far so good (even if we, like I, don't make
sense of _conventional impliacature_). Now, when I first read _that_
example (No. 2) by Grice, I thought: but why go into the troubles and
theoretical complications of saying that the inferrability is merely
implicated? After all you _are_ using a particle ("therefore", plus
intonation and punctuation), i.e. you _are_ relying on a code. Why not say
that you've just SAID (or made it explicit and truly uncancellable) that
7. Jones's bravery follows from his 'Englishry'.
?
I think Grice's observations are, inter alia, trying to justify the odd,
roundabout nature of the particle "therefore" (it)self. I.e. It is,
etymologically, a parataxis, as it were, of "there" + "fore". I.e. it is a
deictic, "there", with the emphatic "fore" added to mean something like a
reference to the a_fore_mentioned content ("Jones is an Englishman"). Now,
it would seem as if, for Grice, neither "there" nor "fore" (nor, a
posteriori, "there-fore" (and cfr. "never-the-less", "all-though",
"not-with-standing", "all-ready", "all-ways", "how-ever", etc) EXPRESSES,
in a fully-fledged full-blown manner, the things he require a particle to
count as proper _encoding_ of full-fledged (or full-blown) inferrability?
Excuse the sloppy convoluted jargon, but, wonder if I'm on the right track!
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8
Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 541148241050 Tel 542214257817
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/
jls@netverk.com.ar
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Nov 20 2001 - 16:25:39 GMT