What's conjointed?
"And" and conjunction. "And" and relevance.
Well, there's L. R. Horn's _Natural History of Negation_ (his 'expansion'
on a seminar given by Haj Ross way back in MIT in 1972) and R. E. Jenning's
_The Genealogy of Disjunction_ (Oxford, 1994). Why, with S. Schwenter's new
book for Garland, _Pragmatics of Conditional Marking: Implicature,
Scalarity, and Exclusivity_, it seems it's only the particle "and" -- of
the four 'structural devices' mentioned by Grice in 'Logic and
Conversation' (in this order: 'not', 'and', 'or', 'if' -- WOW, p.22).
Here are some notes from The LINGUIST List: Vol-13-933. Thu Apr 4 2002.
ISSN: 1068-4875. (Home Page: http://linguistlist.org/) in the form of a
REVIEW of Sanders, T., J. Schilperoord, & W. Spooren, ed. (2001), Text
Representation: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects. Benjamins, 363pp,
ISBN 1-58811-077-X. Human Cognitive Processing 8 (By L A Alemany & I
Castellon).
"In Chapter 8, H Maat claims that the conjunction 'and' does not link two
segments directly, but makes them jointly relevant to the surrounding
context. "Matt's starting point is the relevance theoretic work of D. L.
Blakemore (_Semantic constraints on relevance_. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987),
and R. Carston ('Conjunction, explanation and relevance'. Lingua, 90,
27-48, 1993) who were the first to propose joint relevance as the adequate
account for 'and'. Maat strengthens this notion by considering 'and' as a
topic continuity marker. Taking topic to be the explicit or implicit
question that is being answered by a segment of discourse (J. Van Kuppevelt
(1995). Discourse structure, topicality and questioning. Journal of
Linguistics, 31, 109-147), 'and' combines two segments of discourse as a
single topic. A corpus study of inter-clausal conjunctions shows that the
majority do present joint relevance. Two kinds of joint relevance
environments are distinguished: supporting or elaborating an assumption or
answering a single question, this being the most frequent. Some theoretical
implications of his account of the conjunction are discussed. First, the
meaning of 'and' is claimed to be procedural, because it constrains the
possible implicatures between the joined elements. Second, joint relevance
relations are placed in an expansion of the coherence relation
classification of T J M Sanders, WPM Spooren, and LGM Noordman, (1992).
Towards a taxonomy of coherence relations. Discourse Processes, 15, 1-35),
as a _subtype_ of *non-causal* relations, namely additive and comparative.
Finally, this account is related to recent work on the role of connectives
in the construction of discourse representations, suggesting that the
differences between juxtaposed and coordinated sentences should be
investigated."
May I add a couple (literally by one) 'historical' references in the ps?
Cheers,
JL
Grice Circle.
===
* The first reference is yet another of Grice's editorial policies. When
compiling his _WOW_ (I like T. Wharton's way of calling Grice's book, "Way
of Words", don't I), Grice supressed a rather tidy account of "and" in his
Cole essay, which I append below.
* Then there's A. N. Chomsky. As someone pointed out to me, Chomsky seems
to be working on the assumption that authors with double initials who are
best known for their _second_ initial have "A." as their first initial.
Thus, he credits "A. P. Grice" in _Aspects of the Theory of Syntax_ in the
famous endnote in which (A)NC first mentions the idea that "the order of
'quantifiers' in surface structure sometimes plays a role in semantic
interpretation", with the celebrated example of "Everyone in this room
knows at least two languages" and its passive paraphrase. Chomsky writes
(echoing Dionysius of Halicarnassus, see ref.):
"[A. P. -- sic] Grice suggested that the temoral
order implied in conjunction may be regarded as
a feature of discourse rather than as part of the
meaning of 'and'."
Chomsky, 1965, p. 224.
The fact that Grice was predating the William James Lectures by two years
is yet another result of Chomskyan Revolution, almost.
* The other ref. is to J. O. Urmson, Grice's colleague (see e.g. 'Logic &
Conversation V', WOW, p. 93). In his history of English philosophy 1919-39
he goes more general than Grice. It's not that he _took off his trousers_
and went to bed, but the whole clothes. Thus Urmson (of "Parenthetical
Verbs" fame) writes:
"In formal logic, the connectives "and" and
"or" are always given a minimum meaning, as we
have done above, such that any complex formed
by the use of them alone is a truth-function
of its constituents. In ordinary discourse
the connectives often have a RICHER MEANING;
thus 'he took off his clothes and went to bed'
implies temporal succession and has a different
meaning from 'he went to bed and took off his
trousers'. Logicians would justify their use of
the minimum meaning by pointing out that it is the
COMMON ELEMENT in all our uses of "and". (p. 9).
* Of course my favourite example remains _Ryle's_ in _Dilemmas_: "he felt
bad and had some arsenic."
REFERENCES
Blakemore, D. (1987). Semantic constraints on relevance. London: Basil
Blackwell.
Carston, R. (1993). Conjunction, explanation and relevance. Lingua, 90,
27-48.
DIONYSIUS. Peri syntheseos onomaton. Cited in C.C. de Jonge, "Natura artis
magistra: Ancient rhetoricians, grammarians, and philosophers on natural
word order," Linguistics in the Netherlands 2001, 159-66. ("Events earlier
in time are mentioned earlier in the order of words than those which
occurred later." -one of the eight "natural principles" that influence word
order). (I owe the ref. to R. H.).
Grice, H. P. (1981). Presupposition and conversational implicature. In P.
Cole, ed. Radical Pragmatics. London: Academic Press, pp.113-27
Urmson J. O. _Philosophical Analysis: its development between the two world
wars. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956.
====
Appendix: Grice on 'and' in the passage in 'Presupposition and
Conversational Implicature' suppressed in _WOW_:
Grice writes:
"Plausible examples are perhaps not impossible to find. It was suggested by
Strawson"
Grice's "friend", and "pupil" and knight and "collaborator", and therefore
someone Grice couldn't be spared to catch in yet another inconsistency --
see my 'Robbing Peter to pay Paul'.
"in _An introduction to logical theory_"
A book which Strawson credits -- in the 'Preface' -- as being in part the
result of his tutorials with Grice, even if Grice did not manage to 'save'
him from 'all' the mistakes.
"that there is a divergence between the ordinary meaning of the word "and"
and the conjunction sign of propositional or predicate calculus, because
"He took off his trousers and went to bed"
does not seem to have the same meaning as "He went to bed and took off his
trousers"".
The example _is_ quoted in WOW, p.8, as "He _got into_ bed and took off his
trousers". Note all the editorial policies ranging from Urmson's "clothes"
to Grice's "get into" beds.
"The suggestion here is, of course, that, in order propertly to represent
the ordinary use of the word "and", one would have to allow a special sense
(or sub-sense)"
I like "subsense" for surely it's "and THEN".
"for the word "and" which contained some reference to the idea that what
was mentioned before the word "and""
As Dionysius of Hallicarnassus would have it. See the ref. section above. I
owe the ref. to Dionisius to R. H. and note that Dionysius does not mention
"and", though (or "kai").
"was temporally prior to what was mentioned after it, and that, on that
supposition, one could deal with this case. I want to suggest in reply that
it is not necessary, if one operates on some general principle of keeping
down, as far as possible, the number of special sense"
Sic. Not 'senses'
"of words that one"
Or Ockham.
"has to invoke, to give countenance to the alleged divergence of meaning.
It is just that there is a general supposition which would be subsidary to
the general maxim of Manner ("be perspicuous") that one presents one's
material in AN ORDERLY MANNER"
Emphasis mine to show connection with "Be orderly", Manner's conversational
maxim No. 4.
"and, if what one is engaged upon is a narration (if one is talking about
events), then the most orderly manner for a narration of events is an order
that corresponds to the order in which they took place.
Unless one is telling a joke. As S. Attardo notes in K. Hall, _The Legacy
of Grice_, the important obvious, structural, thing about a a "punchline"
is that it comes, by definition, almost, at the end of a joke. Surely for
comical purposes you can narrate the events in any non-temporal order you
wish.
"So, the meaning of the expression "He took off his trousers and he got
into bed" and the corresponding expression with a logician's constant "&"
(i.e. "he took off his trousers & he got into bed") would be exactly the
same."
I.e. no more no less.
"And, indeed, if anybody actually used in ordinary speech the "&" as a
piece of vocabulary"
Grice means ordinary _written_ language, as when I write letters in
English. I (and neither did Edward, the Prince of Wales -- see _A King's
Story_ -- _never_ use "and". I.e. Grice is using 'speech' _broadly_ and
notably _not_ suggesting that we go about saying things like "Land of hope
ampersand glory".
"instead of as a formal device, and used it to connect together sentences
of this type, they would collect just the same implicata as the ordinary
English sentences have without any extra explanation of the meaning of the
word "and"."
Grice goes on to prove the 'cancellability', producing the typical Gricean
idiom, "He took off his trousers and got into bed. But I don't mean to
suggest that he did those things in that order", of which he writes:
"If that is not a linguistic offense, or does not _seem_ to be, then, so
far as it goes, it is an indication that what one has here is a
conversational implicature, and that the original suggestion of temporal
succession was not part of the conventional meaning of the sentence."
(Grice, in Cole, Radical Pragmatics, p. 186).
==
J L Speranza, Esq
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