RT list: A Shaggy Dog Story

S. Nicolle refers to work by himself (or hisself, call me
overgrammatical every time) and LaPolla:

"Has anyone apart from myself and Randy LaPolla investigated
grammaticalization from the perspective of RT?"

I hope the notes will include some broader perspective of
´grammaticalisation´ within the Gricean and neo-Gricean framework as a
whole. I don´t think Grice considered ´grammar´ too seriously, at least
in the way that _linguist_ take it seriously. I would think his
rudiments of what a Grammar for English (say) would look like, in
published views, is best expressed in "Utterer´s meaning, sentence
meaning, and word meaning" (WoW, WJ6). Why? Well, because by the
natural order of things, he first needs an account of M-intentions
which does NOT rely on semantic metarepresentations per se (if his
account if to be counted as seriously asymmetricalist, as Avramides
puts it -- MIT book). Once provided with this account, an account of
_sentence_ meaning follows -- in a challenge and provocation of most
compositional theories -- and last but not least, _word_ (or utterance
part types, as he´d prefer) meaning. A cursory look at his reflections
on this notes that he was only concerned with the grammar of
´reference´ and ´predication´ as it applies to the simple syntactic
structure, ¨The dog is shaggy¨. I never knew why he would choose such a
contrived example, until a friend introduce
d me into a real shaggy dog
story, which is what Grice´s is! JLS.
Received on Wed Aug 5 17:36:25 2009