The Pratt and the Grice

----------By J. L. S.


------------------- JASON KENNEDY, this blog (comments in "Spot-Bowling with H. P. Grice"), is considering various flouts to

"Don't be repetitive"

from his mentoring author, Thomas Bernhardt. Bernhardt repeats. Not like a cucumber.

My Anglo-Argentine friend, Joan Downey, loves cucumber sandwiches, but they, she complain, meaning 'cucumber', repeat. Cucumber repeats.

I often liked that phrase. In fact, my post to OPERA-L on Donizetti's closing of arias for tenor I entitled something, "Like a Cucumber". It fell sort of flat.

G. N. Leech (in a BEAUTIFUL book, in both senses of the word 'beautiful': just one really: but I mean, such gem of an object: green with gold letters),

"Linguistic Analysis of English Poetry" (I think: it's in the rather elementary Longman Series),

has considered this. He has also considered Novel at large in a book he co-authored with M. Short.

And there's loads of people working in that area in England. My favourite has to be, from Brum, Deirdre Burton, who has expanded on Pinter's plays as Gricean, or anti-Gricean, or Flout-Gricean (Grice can play the "Disgusted," Tunbridge Wells, persona, but he surely allows for floutings to his things to be rejoyced).

But the credit must go to Coulthard. In his, also Longman, "Discourse analysis" textbook he makes the funny claim: Pratt was the first.

So perhaps she was.

Pratt is more American than British. She teaches Spanish (if you can believe that) at Berkeley, where Grice also taught. Her thing got published in 1975, and it's a naive (naif?) but charming application of Grice to _Cortazar_. She has explored further issues, and in a subtler fashion, too, in later books. I LOVE HER.

The book is easy to read. In fact, too easy to read, for the Gricean! But the examples, even if translated, are charming.

Her specific discussion of Grice is pretty brief, but I think her approach should be taken as paradigmatic of a certain type of Anglo-_American_ criticism.

When it comes to 'don't be repetitive', authors of Pratt's ilk should be wondered and should relish on the creativity of sources provided by readers of their opus.

So, all the examples that Kennedy considers for Bernhardt, etc. can be analysed alla the rather conservative Pratt-views. Or no.

---

--

The most fruitful, but also most complex, areas, as far as Anglo-American theory is supposed to go, but won't just go, is from, I believe he is Australian (so much for Anglo-American, but they are Anglo alright, right?)

Gregory Currie.

He notes that first we need to analyse the whole gamut. These are 'etiolated' uses of lingo (as Austin and Grice would have it). And it's pretty bad to mix in one bag: poetry and novel and play etc. Or perhaps not. He talks about meta- issues, and analyses how different flouts can correspond to so-called different (narrowly construed) genres.

--- In this blog I have been retrieving things, and trust that the Eng. Lit. topic has come up in various fora. So I have expanded, THIS BLOG, on things that Grice says with some level of detail on things like

Blake


Love that never told can be.



I think it's sort of best to stick sometimes with 'ambiguity'. I once wrote on Seven Types of Gricean Ambiguity (etc). We have to be careful here because we do not mean POLYSEMY, just 'scope' ambiguity. For Grice, the interpretants of an intentionally ambiguous phrase like that trades on philosophical issues, such as:

-- love as process or product?
-- 'be' as a predicate?

-- He goes on to provide internal evidence and quotes from the whole thing: "prick", "woman", "Nature".

That's just an example of the fluidity of the 'flouting' thing. So Grice is willing to play with elaborated things which are understood as 'flouts' of what we may see as "The Norm" (where this is NOT meant as 'arbitrary' or 'valued' -- versus, say, ab-normal) but as a sort of desideratum for a type of conversation.

Surely one can say: what gives?

I mean, why narrow the whole perspective into Grice's _ex cathedra_ one and then have to suffer the consequences, and see all fiction, say, as a mere 'flout'? Can't we proceed quite the other way round? Etc.

But this is the Grice Club! And we are WILLING to play and get Grice (an Anglo-American) known or be enjoyed by people of other traditions and get the Griceans enriched by those same-self people! If you get my drift!

Cheers,

JL