------------ By J. L. S.
- - - - - - - - - - IF I LEARNED SOMETHING (or as you'd say, 'anything') from Levinson's grand paperback with MIT/Bradford is that GCI can be a bore! I mean, we love him, and all that he represents, but surely his condescending look at what makes Gricean an occamist and a particularised-implicature theorist is his LOVE for the particularised!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -GRICE played on this. Instead of talking, plainly, of general vs. particular implicatures, he has it just right: particularised versus generalised. Out of ... what?
For Occam (or Ockham, as I prefer, since -- that's a loverly village, no?), the generalised is easy enough: we generalise out of the particularised.
The particularised is more of a trick: we particularise out of the generalised, don't think so!
--- It's difficult to give an example of PCI (particularised conversational implicature): ALL are!
But usually, his 1961
uttered at Collections (to Warnock and Urmson)
"Smith has a beautiful handwriting"
-- but he is otherwise hopeless at philosophy.
His example in 1967,
"He hasn't been to prison yet" -- but he is
otherwise honest.
Grice on the distinction:
"I have SO FAR" (after 50 minutes of talk)
"considered ONLY
cases of what I might call
'particularised conversational implicature'"
-- and happy would he be with that, if it were not for SOME in the audience: notably Quine.
"that is to say, cases in which
an implicature is carried by saying
that p on a PARTICULAR occasion"
-- as opposed to Meinongian jungles, where you speak in the abstracto.
"in virtue of special features
of the context"
--- as opposed to general features of the general context, as we may out of context call them --.
"cases in which there is NO ROOM
for the the (sic) idea that an
implicature of this sort is
NORMALLY"
-- cfr. Opera by Bellini, Norma. My favourite.
"carried by saying that p".
-- Kramer may be interested by the focus on 'norms' -- cfr. his 'rules'.
"But there are cases [you know]
of GENERALISED conversational implicature.
Sometimes one can say that the use of
A CERTAIN FORM OF WORDS in an uttearance
WOULD NORMALLY (in the absence of special
circumstances)"
precisely Levinson's point: GCI as _default_: the title of his book is in fact, "presumptive meanings", which do not look Gricean to me at ALL: it's utterer's MEANING that carries implicatures, not meanings thus verbalised! (He is a linguist at heart).
Grice goes on:
"carry such-and-such an implicauture
OR TYPE of implicature. Noncontroversial examples are PERHAPS HARD TO FIND"
--- for they don't exist!
"Since it is ALL TO EASY [indeed silly. JLS]
to treat a generalised conversational
implicature as if it were a conventional
implicature".
-- We don't need to GO there. As Horn said, "The obituary of conventional implicature may have been premature, but..."
Grice goes on:
"I offer an example that I hope may be fairly noncontroversial".
But it's not! Not 'fairly' I mean!
"Peter is meeting a woman for breakfast"
"a", Grice says, 'generalised-conversationally-implicates, "not Peter's wife".
Etc.
"a" is a confused idiom, in that it's originally "an".
"Peter is meeting ONE woman for breakfast"
"But he is having TWO scrambled eggs."
Etc.
So, in answer to Kramer's query in "Comments to Lift Layers", all of Grice's examples are particularised. They are particularised when you cannot fix the thing to a FORM of expression, and when you don't want to abstract to "TYPE" of implicature. Recall too that the criterion for 'implicature' is DETACHABILITY. I.e. there's always a way to express the thing using ANOTHER expression.
"Insofar as the calculation that a PARTICULAR
conversational implicature is present
requires... only knowledge of what has been said...
and insofar as the manner of expression plays
NO ROLE in the calculation, it will not be
possible to find ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING
the same thing WHICH
*****SIMPLY LACKS the implicature in question."
"...If we call this feature nondetachability,
one may expect a(n) implicature to have
a HIGH degree of nondetachability."
From wiki, to consider:
"A conversational implicature is said to be non-detachable when, after the replacement of what is said with another expression with the same literal meaning, the same conversational implicature remains. ... This distinguishes them from conventional implicatures."
--- But the main issue, perhaps, keeps being philosophical, and thus, something that linguists may not be bothered about: the token (particularised) and the, we claim, secondary, ontologically, _type_.
Etc.
"He doesn't implicate by _token_; he implicates by _type_, only". Otiose.
Etc.
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I'm afraid things like CGI and tokens are beyond my ken. So I'll barge ahead subject to correction.
ReplyDeleteAre you familiar with E.B. White's Charlotte's Web? It ends with the line "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both." If my wife were to ask me whether someone is "a true friend." I might say, "well, he's a good writer," meaning "he's not a true friend". Because, between my wife and me, the question would invoke the general (by my usage) rule that to ask if someone is "a true friend" implies "you may answer me by allusion to the last line of Charlotte's Web", and my answer invokes the general (by my usage) rule that when two features normally appear together, saying that a person has one of them in response to whether he has the other implies that he does not have that other.
These two implicatures (that I may answer by allusion and that he is not a true friend) seem to me different in kind. One springs from context and one springs from convention. But in either case, both operate on the basis of what I would call general rules. "Is he a true friend?" is a difficult case because there is no practical situation in which the implication regarding my permitted response would ever be cancelled, but it seems to me that it is logically cancellable ("Is he a true friend, yes or no?" might do). "Well, I know he's a good writer, but his friendship hasn't been tested" cancels application of the general rule about features that normally appear together. (In that response, the bit about his being a good writer is an interpersonal note that I get her drift, which is a useful clue that we are communicating well, although it has no semantic relevance.)
My claim is that every implicature can be justiied by a rule. If you can damn Smith with faint praise, it is because there is a general rule that faint praise is equivalent to insult. If "She has a great personality" is not a nice thing to say about a blind date, it's because there's a general rule about such things. Thus, no matter how narrow an implicature may be, it seems to be, it is always justified by a general rule, one that is subject to cancellation by specific contradiction.
I may have confused things by using the word "general." All rules are general in the way I am using the term, so the word may be otiose here. If that's the case, please accept my apologies. But the legal maxim has it that the specific controls the general, and my project here was to cast the justification for any implicature as "the general" and its cancellation as "the specific."
Points v. much taken, and they have inspired me to write to posts:
ReplyDeleteone on 'well' -- not very inspired, but as you use the thing in "Well, he is a good writer".
the other on 'the web of implicature' echoing I think Quine in the 'web of belief'.
But none on YOUR Point about the generality, otiose no doubt, of the rule. So I will comment in post now. Cheers, JLS