Unmeant Double-Entendres & Other Animals. Grice's and RT's takes.
A chapter from a recent book from Benjamins, S. M. Fitzmaurice's _The
familiar letter in Early Modern English: a pragmatic approach_, is
entitled: "Relevance & the consequences of unintended epistolary meaning."
(full descript as from the LINGUIST list below). Leaving 'relevance' aside,
what _is_ 'unintended' meaning (epistolary or other)?
I think the issue has been discussed at least by R. Reichman and G.
Sampson. Reichman used to say: an implicature is _not_ like a baby: an
unwanted baby is still a baby, but an unwanted implicature is a _misnomer_.
As for Sampson, he discusses in _Making Sense_ (Oxford) some types of
'semantic change':
"Let me give a more favourable example from the
less mass-produced area of human emotions and
relationships [viz. the word 'gay']. ... Not many
years ago 'gay' ... meant, to me, something like
'happy or enjoyable in a witty and carefree way' ...
By now I have become used to the fact that for
many people it means something like 'homosexual,
but with connotations of allegiance to a style of
life deemed to be as honourable as others rather
than in a clinical sense'; since people are anxious
not to commit unintended sexual double-entendres,
the previous sense of _gay_ is rapidly becoming
extinct."
The phrase 'unintended ... double-entendre stuck with me... How can a
double-entendre be 'unintended'.
Back to "Relevance and the consequences of unintended epistolary meaning",
what meaning of 'meaning' are we dealing with here? Having not read
Fitzmaurice's book, I can only guess (plus I never read a book before
commenting on it). Perhaps Fitzmaurice has in mind something like Grice
does in _WOW_:
'Utterer's occasion-meaning in the
absence of an audience [includes]
utterances for which the utterer thinks
there may (now or later) be an audience.
U may think that some particular person,
for example, himself at a future date in
the case of a diary entry, may (but also
may not) encounter U's utterance; or U
may think that there may or may not be some
person or other who is or will be an
auditor of his utterance.'
Studies in the Way of Words, p. 113.
(The issue is discussed in a bit of secondary Gricean bibliography
entitled, 'Grice without an audience', _Analysis_.). Or perhaps the meaning
which is _unitended_ is merely what Grice would call 'natural'? (e.g. WOW,
p. 290). Personally I tend to regard these cases of 'unintended meaning'
and 'unitended double-entendres' (when seen as something other than a
_natural_ type of meaning) as a common-or-garden 'overinterpretation'
necessarily involving a quota of _mis_-understanding...
For the record, I append below the description of Fitzmaurice's book, as
distributed by the Linguist List.
Cheers,
JL
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