"I don't give a hoot what the dictionary says": Grice on ";"

"And that's where you make your big mistake", Austin rebuked Grice (cited by Chapman -- Grice has a more refined version in "Reply to Richards") -- but he did say, 'hoot' as per tape Chapman listened to).

And he shouldn't give a hoot either, at what the dictionary _shows_. Those silly diagraphs. As ";" to indicate an alleged change of sense.

lesbian: inhabitant of Lesbos; lover of the same sex if woman.

etc.

Or those odious square brackets (which should only be used for common-ground status assignation, Grice says, WoW:RE) as in

frank [etym. unkn.]

I mean, what IS known in this world? Shouldn't they (the dictionary folks) at least GUESS? I find it obscene that they are allowed to sprinkle an already thick thing as a dictionary is with "etyms unkns". Etc.

Then, there's the odious,

'fig.'

as in

lesbian: inhabitant of Lesbos; fig. a lover of the same-sex if woman.

Do they think we are unable to figure out for ourselves that this is 'fig'?

--- Anyway.

No wonder Grice got so irritated that he had to modify the razor:

Do not multiply SENSES beyond your normal necessities.


One regrets that few lexicologists (I can only namedrop Kilgarriff) are Griceans at heart. Burchfield, the populariser, not even is not, but does not even care to be explicit enough about what he SHOULD be explicit (enough), to wit: the OED's editorial policy on the matters Gricean. But then, what can you expect? These people are not philosophers.

Why, if I were to write dictionaries, surely I would be bored if I had to read Grice, WoW. So a vice versa is more than welcomed from Grice.

Burchfield, for example, and others who have written bios on Murray, etc., note the explicit avoidance by the OED -- which was originally merely a NED -- i.e. nothing like the Short/Lewis or Liddell/Scott -- of 'dialect', for example. "Avoid dialect" they would distribute. This aggravated Wright so -- he was from the part of England that matters: the North -- that he found obliged to edit his own EDD, English Dialect Dictionary, which irritated Murray, the Scot.

From what I see it's the Semi-Colon that marks the transference of alleged senses. Further, Burchfield refers to transferred "usages", or "uses", rather than senses, which has a Wittersian ring to it, to be avoided, too.

As it happens Grice gets a cursory reference by the Neo-Zealander, on p.47. But Grice can occupy more than that. Thre's first what he calls "Modified Occam's
Razor" -- he means Ockham in Surrey. How do we formalise, "Do not multiply senses beyond necessity". How do we turn it into a feasible lexicological practical policy? You can't!

So let's consider the form of, say, an OED entry


"a; b"

-- as in the entry for "Turk" quoted by Burchfield

"member of the Ottoman race; unmanageable child"

How are we to understand the figurative -- philosophically speaking, as it
were? And should we? No! Hence Grice's point about his hoot-not-giving.

Does the OED allow for

"a, b"

-- i.e. with a comma, rather than a semi-colon, to be a sign also of this transferred, 'figurative', use?

I don't think so. When they 'comma' they are, you be warned, in their Roget's treasury mode: they will list more than you need listed!

What's worse: one can see that a lexicographer cares a hoot about Russell/Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, but how _far_ must the editorial policy concerning a 'figurative' transference go? How wildly figurative could 'b' be, as it were? How was this refleced in the lexicological tradition in England? What are the explicit 'ambiguity tests' - with special reference to the 'figurative' - used by the makers of the OED, or other dictionaries, from Cawdrey onwards?

Broad issues, but perhaps there IS a specific monograph/book/encyclopaedia on the topic!

Grice at the OED.

As it were -- and I don't mean the fact that thanks to _me_ -- ADS-L, online -- he has a misattribution in the OED now as "British linguist"!

Burchfield makes the distinction between "general" vs. "period", "regional" and "subject" dictionaries - not forgetting 'encyclopaedias', etc -, so I
see the policies will vary, but should they? What _is_ the English language? Is Davidson right, "no such thing"? I think so!

I would also make the difference between the dictionary and the alleged mental lexicon that some people confess they carry in their heads -- I only carry grey matter, alas. A 'competent', so-called speaker need not be aware that a certain
expression has attained a figurative use - especially if this use is
'beyond' the standard schemes of common-sense reasoning, as one may call it
(Cfr. Grice John Locke Lectures at Oxford on 'Aspects of Reason & Reasoning)

Or Tapper skipping the step,

"She has an insect of genus A. in his cloth-material head coverer"

meaning "She is somewhat agitated by something she is presumably thinking".

As if we need to postulate a subterranean thing here. Vide Grice on PERE, principle of economy of rational effort in Grandy/Warner. "No need to say that we TACITLY think these things. We don't want mixed metaphors of subterranean thingies here".

Unfortunately, all the examples the philosopher can think of 'fig.' uses can are philosophically irrelevant dysphemisms, or euphemisms -- unless you are doing Hume on 'cause' -- a gross metaphor if ever there was one -- and animistic to boot. Grice WoW:xi. Or worse, coded jargon, and delinquent speech of gangsters!

Where is your Lit. Hum. MA Oxon when you need _her_?

It is also difficult (to a confessed Gricean) to draw the line between mental lexicon/dictionary info, let alone 'the standard schemes of common-sense reasoning' that Burchfield freely refers to. His freedom of speech is derivative of his New Zealander status. None of that silly liberalism in more archaic Merrie England!

Etc.

----

From R. Burchfield, "Unlocking the English Language", Faber. The New Zealander was editor of the Suppl. of the OED, 1972-1986:

"We can catch glimpses of lost of dying ways of speaking by reading older
works, as for example, by turning to the increasingly unconsulted test of
the Auhtorised Version of the Bible (1611). Let me remind you of some of the
1611 uses that live on in the AV even though they have been replaced by
supposedely 'timeless' equivalents in the New English Bible: "He maketh me
to lie downe in greene pastures" (Psalm 23:2), a natural construction in
1611, has given way to "He makes me lie down green pastures." in the NEB.
Other examples: "They are moe then the haires of mine head" (Psalm 40:12) is
replaced by "They are more than the hairs of my head." "A golden reede to
measure the citie and the gates thereof and the wall thereof" (Rev 21:15) by
"A gold measuring rod to measure the city, its walls and its gates." The
conjunction "for to" and the proposition "vnto" ("saluation is come vnto the
Gentiles, for to prouoke them to ielousie" Rom ll:11) have become rememberd
tokens of a past age. The adverb "alway" has given way to "always", or in
the NEB to "unceasingly", or some other synonyms. Older forms of the verb
"to be", the commonest of all English verbs, linger on as linguistic
phantoms in the AV but have otherwise passed into disuse: "Art thou the
first man that was born, or wast thou made before the hills?" (Job 15:7).
"Thou being a wilde oleue tree wert graffed in amonst them" (Rom 11:17)".
I hope that for at least a century to come the ability to read and
understands the AV and the Book of Common Prayer will be regarded as a test
of literacy. Anyone who ignores or puts aside such landmarks is as deprived
as those who know nothing of the Norman Conquest and the French Revoltuion,
or any other military or social events of great consequence that occurred in
past centuries. For T S ELiot the New Testament of the New English Bible
(1961) was not even a work of distinguished mediocrity. In 1979 a group of
eminent writers including K Amis, C Fry, M Lask and I Murdoch, expressed
their deep concern about "this great act of forgetting" which is leading to
the gradual abandonment of the AV and the Book of Common Prayer. Just to
list some of the changes made between the old and the new versions - the
deletion or replacement of words like "abiding", "loe", "sore afraid",
"unto", "tidings", "yee", "all at once", and intricate small changes made in
the order of words - reveals the outward signs of a desvastating loss of
religious mystery in the modern versions. The grammatical and linguistic
semantics of such linguistic substitutionns merit further study. Perhaps Dr
D A Cruse whose useful monograph Lexical Semantics has cleared the ground of
such matters as the sense-spectrum in uses of the word 'mouth' [...] will
now turn his attention to the sense-spectrum in the replacement of "sore
afraid by terror stricken" and of "I bring you good tidings of great joy" by
"I have good news for you"".
[ch. 'The boundaries of Engish grammar'. Sect 'A rich cargo', p52].