Grice Goes Deep

which in linguists' parlance reads 'surface'.

-- Chapman pours scorn on Grice. She _is_ a linguist alright (although she teaches English to English speakers at Liverpool! I love her!)

She writes (words):

"What amused me bunches, when revising those
14 large cartoon boxes that Mrs. Grice deposited
at Bancroft, was the jottings by Grice on
distinctive feature analysis of his dialect,
"I thoroughly thought though not theoretically
thick".
and the syntax"

Kramer joins in:

"Urmson is into something silly here", or words:

"They say you're pregnant," is a
statement about the rumor mill.
"You are, they say, pregnant" is
a statement about you, with
information about why I think so.
It is not the "class of verb" that
matters here."

I.e. it's the surface. You have to be deep enough to see it though. Indeed. N. Hinton, a pedant at the HOTEL (history of the English language) where I shared my Urmsoniana with) argued,

"Surely Urmson did not know the first thing about Chomsky".

I replied, "But _I_ do!" And proposed the two lovely trees below. To nitwit (myself):


S1
.
. .
NP VP
. .
. . .
. V NP
. . .
. . . .
. . conj S2
. . . .

for Urmson's non-parenthetical:

"I know(that)the cat is on the mat."

and

S1
.
.
. .
NP .
. .
. .
. . .
Det N VP
. . . .
. . . .
. . S2 V Mod

for

Urmson's parenthetical

"The cat (I know) is on the mat."

--- Urmson calls "I know" a floater there -- it's really 'floating' _syntactically speaking_ he adds. I agree.

The use of parenthesis helps, but as Urmson notes, 'people often drop them in informal speech'.

Etc.


"They say you're pregnant," is a statement about the rumor mill. "You are, they say, pregnant" is a statement about you, with information about why I think so. It is not the "class of verb" that matters here.