Re: RT list: Non-sentential utterances, logical form, explicatures (e.g. in poetry)

Dear Professor Gutt,

It is my understanding that a logical form is the minimal encoded
content of any utterance. In this sense, it is a string of concepts, a
conceptual schema which needs to be enriched into an explicature to
reach full propositional status. Given the current RT account this
enrichment cannot but take place on the basis of some decoding that
feeds this logical form in the deductive inferential device, so yes in
principle I assume that you cannot have any sort of interpretation of
some piece of language without decoding it into a logical form (which
raises the interesting question of at which stage you incorporate
non-words, like sighs etc, in the comprehension process. I'm not sure
whether work on interjections covers this, but would be glad if
someone could illuminate me on this). I would say then that a poem
verse clearly has a logical form, merely because it is a linguistic
stimulus.

Now, with respect to explicatures, I am not sure how you construct
those in such cases, as you'd have to enrich the logical form into a
full proposition and hence significantly expand it, but I suspect that
an absolutely full expansion wouldn't be necessary, as you obviously
don't need to get some exact or 'eternal' explicit content to
appreciate a poem.. Again, this is only what my intuition tells me as,
to be honest, I've never given this any serious thought. Another thing
that I suspect would be relevant here would be the amount of effort
that we are prepared to spend while comprehending poems. I get the
feeling that when I read a poem I just casually get the feel of it
(possible work out some implicatures too), but when a literary analyst
does it, s/he would need to potentially think about such things as
what is explicitly said and what is implicated.

Either way, thank you very much for asking this - it's indeed very
good food for thought and I'd also be keen to see what others have to
say on it.

All the best,
Stavros

On 11 February 2011 17:25, <ernst-august_gutt@sil.org> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> According to the definition of explicature, it is dependent on an utterance
> having a logical form.
> Question: when does a verbal utterance have a logical form?
>
> The first stanza of Oscar Wilde's poem "The dole of the king's daughter"
> reads as follows:
>
> Seven stars in the still water,
> And seven in the sky;
> Seven sins on the the King's daughter,
> Deep in her soul to lie.
>
> Does this stanza have any logical forms, explicatures (if only weak ones)?
>
> Any insights/comments appreciated.
>
> Ernst-August Gutt
>
>

-- 
Stavros Assimakopoulos
Postdoctoral Investigator
Department of Philosophy I
University of Granada
------------------------------------
http://www.ugr.es/~stavros/