RT list: The king is dead. Long live the king

Was: Warm beer at awesome picnics
 
Regarding this query to the relevance list sometime ago (below), it struck
me that, besides the topic of 'warm beer at awesome picnic', there's the
one in the header.
 
It struck me that for some time, I did think it was contradictory:

the king is dead . long live the king
 
              1 1
 
 

----
 
 
It was only when I heard it say in a film with possibly Elizabeth I as  
successor,
 
 
       the king is dead   .    long live the queen
 
 
that I realised my mistake.
 
---
 
I wonder if the sentence will again be uttered -- there's this symposium on 
 the future, circulated in this forum -- as it applies to the monarch to 
be. It  strikes me as an official phrase, so possibly it will be uttered.
 
PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS alla Grice:
 
 
       the king is dead .  long live the  king.
 
 
strikes me, if not as loose speech, as a pretty figure of rhetoric, "figure 
 of speech", as Grice calls them in "Logic and Conversation" 
(Conversational  Implicatures, Type 1). For:
 
       There is NO marked passage of  anaphoric referent, so the utterer
        _must_ be 'punning' on 'the  king' getting, as my mistake was,
        the same referent.
 
Cf. the 'explicature' version:
 
       Who WAS the king in the past has  passed. Therefore, I invite
       ye all and raise the cup to the NEW  monarch, that he may live long.
 
Why doesn't he 'go' that way?
 
("Go" is NOT a Valley Girlism -- it was used by Dickens, the OED notes, and 
 refers to the phonic or phemic act alla Austin, i.e. to the utterance  
uttered).
 
FLOUTING the maxim.
 
    The obvious reason is that the utterer _is_ flouting the  maxim.
 
The 'working-out' scheme proceeds along almost Levi-Straussian binary +/-  
lines:
 
          1. the utterer has  just said,
                   the king is dead. long live the king.
 
           2. he has  not made it explicit in any explicit fashion
                    that he is 'changing the topic' (as Quine would have it)
 
           3. And he  isn't. He is talking monarchy. But is his
                 invite  to raise the cup contradictory:
 
                        for if the king is dead, he CANNOT or shouldn't 
live long.
 
           3. Nay. He  cannot be uttering a contradictory invite.
 
           4. Therefore,  'the king', as the requester below notes, has
                    undergone an 'anaphoric' metastasis. Etc.
 
J. L. Speranza
The Swimming Pool Library, Bordighera
 
 
 
 
 
"I am interested in the role of inference in examples of reference  
assignment such as:
A: How did the picnic go?
B: Awful.The beer was warm.
x:: The beer was part of the  picnic
Carston (2002) says thax  -- an accessible assumption) acts as an  
implicit premise / bridging implicature that must be accessed in order  
to determine the referent of the beer in a. If this is the case, what 
is  the implicated conclusion in this example? Also, would it not be 
possible to  interpret this example via narrowing and the formation of 
the ad hoc concept  beer* (representing the subset of properties that 
relate to beer being drunk  at parties)? Any comments on these issues 
would be greatly  appreciated.