Grice: Procedures: Basic versus Resultant

Kramer has disparaged, friendlily, what he calls the hillbillies. These lack, he claims, book-learnin' (sic), and say things like JL says,

notably

hisself theirselves

He notes words to the (perlocutionary) effect that their charm resides in the ability they offer the casual onlooker or onhearer to 'understand what we mean by regularity'.

For indeed, regularisation is THE key to many dialect features.

Regularity is the key in a book, nay sentence, adored by Austin. This is Chomsky, Syntactic Structures. Picture these Oxonian dons gathering on a Saturday morning -- usually at Grice's college, St. John's -- to analyse, sentence by sentence, this little booklet by the American linguist.

Grice recovered the ideas of Chomsky -- "a mighty intelligent chap", he would say, "although I'll be damned if I ever endorsed any of his views" -- Reply to Richards (words to that perlocutionary effect) in what he labelled in WoW, vi -- William James lectures, a stone's throw from MIT -- (and he was a batter)

basic
procedures
resultant

These concern 'meaning', rather than 'syntax', but they echo the idea of GENERATIVENESS. A 'resultant' procedure is one that follows logically from things.

So, if it's

my-self
your-self

her-self
our-selves

Surely, the resultant procedure goes -- and this is morphosyntactic-cum-semantic

his-self
and
their-selves

On the other hand, the snobs who've been to school can flout the resultant procedures and install a BASIC procedure. Basic to THEM, but not to the hillbillies. The basic procedures are:

"Unless it's he or they, you form the reflexive by adding the possessive plus self."

But the hillbillies dislike, suspect, and refuse the 'unless'. Plus, they speak like Shakespeare. And it's Shakespeare it "is" hisself and theirselves.

Kramer claims that in

He stopped self-beating

i.e.

He stopped beating hisself

what we mean, or what a hillbilly means is

He stopped beating HIM, i.e. 'lui meme'.

It's not like he stopped beating his 'abstract' self. He stopped beating his body, him.

This leaves aside the obscure cases of mental self-abuse, which I must delay for a longer day.

Cheers,

JL