Kramer wrote, somehwere,
"Help"
I thought that to mean that he meant help. But that's not enough. "We need the 'that'-clause," Grice remarks (Recall his, "If you can't put it in symbols, it's not worth saying"). While the beatles can say, even 'utter' since it's sailors's language,
HELP
and get away with 'help', we cannot. So by uttering 'Help' I took that Kramer was meaning that I was to provide some help, etc.
--- Rather than he was _offering_ some.
Now he goes (We analysed this with Kramer, the 'go' thing--while ultimately a Valley-Girl thing which we are not -- it originated in a novel by Dickens, the OED2 has it, to mean 'produce the sound of' -- it's a phatic, phemic thing).
"My "help" was a sincere but
overstated request for clarification.
In that list of rhetorical thingies,
where is the opposite of meiosis?"
Egsactly. God knows.
Hyperbole they say. As in, Grice's example, from the music-hall song,
Every nice girl loves a sailor.
_not_ meaning the _same_ sailor, though -- that would NOT be hyperbolic, I guess.
But I liked your 'over-state' versus, of course, 'under-state'. State is a good one, but doesn't work with ellipsistical (as Geary calls them) things like "Help". Because you are not _STATING_ anything, so how can you OVERSTATE what you're not even STATING. Understate, yes, mabbe.
Mill uses sous-entendu, as in the OED, and blog post, "Mill to the Grice", this blog. Which may be what you mean, only differently and antonymically.
Etc.
"My "help" was a sincere but overstated request for clarification."
Well, I'mn glad you asked. Actually it wasn't so overstated, if you look at it (biscuit conditional there -- alla There are biscuits in the cubboard if you are hungry).
Etc.
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"Help" was a simple sentence in the imperative mood. Or, as the aviators say "M'aidez!"
ReplyDeleteIt is overstated because one ordinarily cries "help" rather than merely says it, almost always in the context of desperation. There is a wonderful New Yorker cartoon that I cannot find on line in which a man is falling clumsily down the stairs in front of his building, and a passer-by offers "Of course, I'll help you. What are you trying to do?"
Exactly. For the record, Mill on sous entendu, since this labels, confusedly, this thread:
ReplyDelete"No shadow of justification is shown...for adopting into logic a mere sous-entendu of common conversation in its most unprecise form. If I say to any one, "I saw some of your children today", he might be justified in inferring that I did not see them all, not
because the words mean it, but because, if I had seen them all, it is most likely that I should have said so: even though this cannot be
presumed unless it is presupposed that I must have known whether the children I saw were all or not."
A different animal altogether.
Point taken about the logical form of your
Help.
which I then have as something like
!(HELP (Speranza, Kramer) ^x¡
where "^x¡" indicates a line along the course of action to be taken by Speranza to comply, etc.
"What are you trying to do?"
Oddly, Grice entitled his 'cooperative principle' as 'helpfulness' before he changed it, well, to 'cooperative'. I think there is a blog about that here, "Benevolence" in title, or something. Later.