--- by J. L. S.
----- for the Grice Club
---- MY FRIEND J. M. GEARY WAS RETELLING HOW A MAN APPROACHED him by the river Mississipi, and asked out of the blue:
"What is That?"
My friend replied,
"Oh, that's the Desoto Bridge".
"No. The thing singing next to it --"
"The bird?"
"Yes".
"Well, bird".
"But what type of a bird?"
"A mocking-bird"
--- My friend reflected:
What's closest to us stays farthest away
And reminds me how unGricean some Italians can be. Lawrence, the controversial author of controversial "Lover of Chatterley", reminisces he was strolling along the Tuscany fields, and asked his fellow peasant:
"Now -- what _is_ that?"
"Oh, ..."
"È un fiore."
Literally, "It's a flower" -- pro-drop, "Is a flower".
Lawrence reminisces: "I had just read ch. iii, section 2 of Mill's System of Logic, and it struck me that the Italians will perhaps never get the sous-entendu. For there was something in my apt question, "What is _that_?" which obviously went over the head of my fine friend, who, on top of that, thought that I was an idiot, in not recognising a flower from his back."
---- Cooperative principle in comments.
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The ref. here is Holdcroft, "Principle of Charity and Maxims of Conversation", in Bouveresse/Parrett. Holdcroft is having in mind 'radical interpretation'. Native says:
ReplyDelete'gavagai'.
Did he mean, 'rabbit'? 'rabbit-part'? 'detached rabbit part', 'wild rabbit'?
--- "The way to go," Holdcroft argues, is by way of Grice's maxims of informativeness". The principle of cooperation, or efficiency, and the conversational category of 'quantity' or quality-quantity or plain informativeness will guide the hermeneutics.
"It's a flower" is something Lawrence, we assume, and SO SHOULD HAVE THE ITALIAN PEASANT HE WAS WITH, knew.
But I don't know. I recall walking the streets with Buenos Ayres with -- since it was St. Patrick's Day yesterday -- my friend Brendan Ward, of the Irish embassy. "What's 'mondongo'?" he asked as we passed a restaurant offering it as their fare of the day. "Oh, some food". I was having deep thoughts in my head, and couldn't be bothered. He overreacted. "Thank you!" he said. In fact, I wouldn't know how to describe the thing. It's a pretty bad food and I can't see how a restaurant was offering it --.
"that" must always be signalled to somehow by the speaker and interpreted somehow by the listener?
ReplyDeleteNot enough information provided, what the speaker wanted to know was the name of the flower, they should have said as much. I say it all the time, "What is the name of X in Y, Claudia?" (as my gf speaks quite a few languages)
Lazy Lawrence!
It's most amusing that the peasant may have assumed Lawrence had never seen a flower before.
Yes. I suppose Lawrence could have been more explicit.
ReplyDeleteChe e?
even pointing to the flower, SEEMS ambiguous. I wouldn't think he was expecting the man or person to provide genus and species.
I happen to be a birdwatcher and in our circle obviously we go by
furnarius rufus -- ovenbird
pitangus sulphuratus -- cheekadee
troglodytes aedon -- wren
columba livia -- pigeon
paroaria coronata -- cardinal
larus argentatus -- gull
etc.
That seems to be specific enough. For I cannot imagine a dialogue:
A: What's that?!
B: Pitangus sulphuratus!
A: I knew THAT! I was asking about age (or gender).
--- The gulls especially change so dramatically from brown to white and grey that observers prefer to watch them while brown, which do look like a different species. A few books I have have illustrations of birds at different stages.
The maximum informativeness must go to Monty Phyton:
"it's a _dead_ parrot".
But there are many parrots. The one we see here is the monk parakeet, which has become a plague in Short Beach Drive in Branford, CT!
----
The names of flowers are even more difficult. So Lawrence got what he deserved in a way. He indeed could have asked, "What type of flower is this?", Or "what is the name of this flower".
Personally, if I'm watching a bird -- like the local so-called "red partridge", I want to be told it's a member of the tinamiformes, a very old order and phylum. The genus and species is hardly informative. Orders and Families is what we go by.
There must be something about wildlife. Yesterday I was with this friend whose mother AND father are 'ichthyologists'. Interesting. And if Austin and Grice practiced LINGUISTIC botany (or botanising, as they preferred) it must be because it can get even more technical than mere, say, butterfly-spotting (itself pretty complicated and a good simile to make, too, with word-watchers and preciousism-spotters).