Lawrence J. Kramer, for the Grice Club
Are you all familiar with Pandora and the Music Genome Project? I’m wondering if there is something like a morphological taxonomy of English sentences such that we can say, for example, that Spot runs is type 1.1 and See Spot Run is type 2.1. I’m assuming that there are a finite number of permutations of parts of speech in well-formed English sentences, and that it is possible to say, at any point in a sentence, how many of those possibilities remain in play.
We could then create a Sentence Morphology Computer that would compute for each sentence a Metalinguistic Ambiguity Index based on how quickly the sentence’s metalinguistic cues reduce the possible remaining morphologies. For example, the sentence that starts
I need my car to…
can head off in many more directions than one that starts
I need my car in order to…
or, as I prefer,
I need my car so that I can …
Is there a term for the difference in the power of locutions to limit the remaining eligible morphologies? I ask because I think that the best communication puts to bed early A’s uncertainties in this regard, that the fewer directions a sentence may go, the more quickly A’s navigator can steer to the right one.
The issue is not avoiding ambiguity at the semantic level – context may clear that up completely - but at the metalinguistic level. In other words, if we are to “be brief” in our semantic message, ought we not also to be brief in our metalinguistic cues?
My guess is that if we put the best expository writing through the SMC, the MAI would be smaller than for less well-regarded prose. Now all we need is a grant, or, as is more often the case, a citation from JL to where such a project has been done. Or undone.
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I'll think about it. And will check sources, thanks. The Music Genome reminds me of this talk I heard from Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin (of "Mission Impossible" fame): the mechanism that detects melodies so that they cannot be called 'plagiarism', or something.
ReplyDeleteI most naturally think of 'collocations' but -- while non-natives love them, and ab-use them, natives are always flouting them. A native speaker can do everything, Chomsky says, provocatively. He has, by definition, perfect knowledge. He is the 'ideal' native speaker. There was once a Festchrift for Native Speaker. So, I would re-consider the
pirots karulise elatically
karulise pirots elaticacally
elatically pirots karulise
karulise elatically pirots
pirots karulise elatically
elatically karulise pirots
--- I must have the mimeo somewheere, but I once did all the combinatories for
the cat is on the mat.
which _is_ indeed, I learned from Toulmin (but can't find the source), the equivalent, perhaps in England, of
Spot runs.
See spot run.
In fact, it's
the cat sat on the mat.
----
Because rhyme counts -- not just 'reason'. I recall that linguist Fiorenza Salvarezza, a disciple of Chomsky and member of the International Pragmatic Association, was witnessing my talk and couldn't believe her _ears_ as to the combinatories I was proposing for examination. (It was a seminar discussion of Chomsky, Rules and Representations, that I was attending as part of my PhD programme).
--- I agree with Kramer about the MAI and the SMC. One thing that sort of irritates me, though, is humam memory as narrowed down by Zipf. I think I referred to this in my "Mise en abyme". I had found online a reference to 'syntactically impossible (to process)' sentences: They involve a loop, of the recursive kind. I will see if I can retrieve the examples. There are various types. Zipf claims that the syntax parameters are finite in the human mind. So that
the mouse that runs.
the cat that burps
the dog that scares.
The dog scares the cat that burps the mouse that runs.
makes sense but with "embedding", to use Kramer's apt metaphor in title of this post it is not so clear:
The dog which (the cat which (the mouse that ran) burped) scared.
is less transparent.
There is a second type of loop that involves reflexivity or token-reflexivity, as in
(p) I'm sure that p.
which, in its oral format, becomes:
I am sure that I am sure that I am sure that I am sure that I am sure that I am sure that I am sure that...
----
Early to bed early to rise
--- The embedding of implicatures, incidentally, was a major concern for Grice, as per quote to follow I hope, and which may relate.
Early to bed. We are considering embedding, in a way, i.e. the type of clauses, some of them embedding or of the embedding type that has the Addresse intended to go 'early to bed'.
ReplyDelete"If" for example, is a trick of an embedded. "I only said 'if'" Alice complains. Not so, "you said a great deal more than that".
If there is a conversational implicatum in the protasis of an if-clause, for example, what must the addressee to do? Must he wait for context to simplify things for him?
Cohen's example was:
If the monarch is deposed and a republic founded, I shall be leaving the country.
If a a republic is founded and the monarch deposed, I shall be leaving the country.
If she got married and had a child, his name should be "Tix".
If she had a child and got married, his name should be "Tix".
Grice writes:
"The question which at this point particularly beset not only me but various other philosophers as well was the question whether it is or isnot required that a nonconventional implicature should always possess maximal scope. Wehn a sentence which used in isolation standardly carries a certain implicatum, is EMBEDDED in a certain (syntactic) context, must the EMBEDDING operator be interpreted ONLY as working on the 'truth-conditions' of the EMBEDDED clause, or may it on occasion be INTERPRETED as governing, as well, the conversational implicatum of the EMBEDDED clause? Only if an EMBEDDING operator may on occasion be taken as governing not the truth-condition but the implicatum can my account be made to work! The denial of an if-clause needs to be interpreteed as denying not the truth-condition, but the implicatum, as well, which attaches to an isolated use of the embedded clause. It certainly does not seem reasonable to subscribe to an absolute ban on the possibility that an embedding clause may govern the implicatum rather than the truth-condition." Consider:
A: I spent the whole summer cleaning the Augean stables.
it would NOT be reasonable "of me," Grice writes, "to respond that he coud have been doing that since he spent the summer in Seattle and the Augean stables are not in Seattle". "But where the limits of a (syntactic type of) license may lie which allows us to relate embedding operators to the implicata rather than the truth-condition, I do not know." (WoW: 375).
---- So collocations can be tricky, "Early to bed..." invites certain collocations, for example, and I'd wait, thus, to the final breath, within his move -- "Are you done with the sentence?" to proceed, rather than be armed with 'initial-triggering' mechanisms. But I'll think of cases. Thanks.
(p) I'm sure that p.
ReplyDeletewhich, in its oral format, becomes:
I am sure that I am sure that I am sure that I am sure that I am sure that I am sure that I am sure that...
I seem to recall an article by Quine in which he played this trick with
Time is money.
If time is money, then time is money.
If, If time is money, then time is money, then time is money.
etc.
My recollection (this was 40+ years ago) is that the object was to show the utility of symbolic logic by demonstrating that for each of us, there is a point when the mind stops comprehending the sentence as a mental image and begins, instead to compute that the sentence is a sentence one believes augmented by stuff that does not change its truth value.
I'm not sure how this connects to the recursive loop, but there it is.
JL -
ReplyDeleteI wonder if you could unpack Grice's thing about embedded operators for us dummies. What is an "embedded operator"? What is embedded in what in which example? What is the implicatum and what is the truth-conditional thingy? What does an implicature having or not having "maximum scope" look like?
This is taxonomy with smallish potatoes. With resonance patterns only, that is: musically non-referring, it is about the equivalent of analytic combinatorics for any Russell/Whitehead logic programme. Add on the other referents, some ordering rules and..that's about my life since I got the sense/reference bug in the 1960s.
ReplyDeleteI'll try to address Kramer's point. Indeed, Grice is not clear. When he speaks of "truth-conditional", indeed, what he has, sorry about that, is something so more complex and obscure that I fear to tread on it. He speaks of conventional "meaning". I may have elaborated this with Horn. I think he is meaning, Grice is, in, "I've spent all summer cleaning the Augean stables". This conversationally implicates, "Doing some real hard work". Never mind about Greece. So, the conversationalist who denies:
ReplyDelete"It is NOT the case you've spent all summer cleaning the Augean stables. Because you were in Seattle, not in Greece."Grice finds such a response to an implicatural move "thwarted" or unreasonable. So, the embedding here is exactly what Quine means in that excellent article you refer to: A says "p" -- thereby implicating "q" (I've been doing some hard work). The correct co-conversationalist should rather stick to the Implicatum. It's a bit like Larry Tapper's comment, THIS BLOG, "No, Nancy hasn't got a bee in her bonnet". If we are saying, say, that "p & q" only conversationally implicates "and then", the negation of "p & q", alla DeMorgan, should NOT be concerned with the implicatum. But Grice finds it unreasonable that people should ignore conversational implicata like that. He wants a license but can't imagine what the line is to be drawn. He disqualifies an "absolute ban" as he puts it. In the case, "if time is money, time is money", we may build a similar argument, in next comment right now.
In the case of
ReplyDelete"If p, p".
This resembles what the OED has as a woman's reason.
A:(male) But WHY do you call him?
B: Just because. I like him because I like him.
Cfr. Why do you wear tennis shoes?
Implicature: Just because. Not funny. Irwin Corey's rigmarole, funny.
---
Levinson, "Pragmatics", has:
"If he comes, he comes"
+> There's nothing you can do about it, so -- relax.
"If time is money, time is money"
-- +> Get over it.
-- +> I'm only saying "if" --
-- +> And having just discussed, "the love of money is the root of all evil", by equitive commutation, if time is money, the love of time is the root of all evil.
---
In theory, there is no connection other than the truth-functional(Grice sticks to truth-functional rather than truth-conditional. Truth-condition is more of a Wittgensteinian parlance).
If time is money, time is money
Tautology -- given the truth-function for ->. This IS a trick example because one may need to agree that "if" is truth-functional in Engilsh, which is not something the least Gricean will do. Cfr. "If time WERE money, time were money".
So, whatever the connection is held to be between
"p --> p" is not saying much. Indeed, for Witters, that IS a mark of a tautology. "If time is money, time is money" does not depict a "picture" of the world. One should NOT be saying things which we all know, so one looks for the implicature, "Get over it -- or relax" as the case may be. (I find it irritating that things like "if he comes, he comes" do not project the same implicatures than "if time is money, time is money" -- the CHOICE of the constants projects a different implicatum, as Grice notes: "Women are women", "War is war".
---
So the negation of "p --> p" cannot be but a contradiction (on the face of it). By embedding it as Quine does, exactly as
i.p -> p
ii. (p -> p) -> (p -> q).
----- From (i), replacing "p" by "p -> q" in all occurrences -- cfr. resolution of equations.
iii. etc.
The implicatum of (i) is likely, as you say, to be lost by the time the thing gets embedded.
In any case, I was just playing on your "early to bed" by which you mean quite some other thing, as per next comment.
What YOU are meaning by "early to bed" has more to do, as I see it, with something I was never too concerned with, because I am, like I hope Grice was, and I know YOU are too, a very visual (analogical) person. Grice has ANYTHING as a vehicle for meaning. Notably, a hand-wave (HW) he has it by which a driver means that the driver behind him has free way. Or something.
ReplyDeleteSo that's hardly DIGITAL. We cannot LINEARISE a hand-wave. Someone winks at us. There is usually an implicatum. We cannot linearise a wink, or a frown (to use Green's example in his online "Grice's Frown".
But with lingo of the type that Chomsky loved, it's all about concatenation rules. Grice does use the concatenation sign -- which I can't find on my keyboard right now -- to mean just sequencing. Here it should be pointed out that Chapman finds it charming (in a somewhat condenscending manner, for both linguists and philosophers) that Grice should have been concerned with trees and distinctive features (in phonology). When it comes to a tree, and Grice knew all about them, since he had read, with Austin, Chomsky's Syntactic Structures back in 1959, it's about how to digitalise the analog:
I need a car to---
or to use Chomsky's example
"Alice is always eager to..."
please.
---
S(sentence) --> NP + VP
Spot runs
See Spot run, is, rather
S --> VP (V(see) NP-S(N(Spot) + V(run)))
-- since English requires a digitalisation of a hierarchical sort of analogic structure, we do need indeed something like
"Early to bed".
I was just amusingly referring to the fact that since "embedding" occurs frequently in syntax, one better wait for the final stroke of the move to have been digitalised, process it as such, consider any implicatum. And respond appropriately.
I am thinking of considering thwarted implicatures of sex, too. Consider,
"I like it when you squeaze them: To bed with Grice".
A: I like it when you squaze them.
B: It??!
A: Well, them. I liked them squeazed.
Etc. I am thinking of retrieving Cortazar's dirty nonsensical talk in "Hopscotch" and see if a "lover" would not be offended if they spent the whole "session" conversing. (But cfr. the Old Testament, "And Even held a long conversation with Adam"). Etc.
I quoted from Grice, WoW: Retrospective Epilogue: Only if we have some sort of algortithm here, "can my account be made to work".
ReplyDeleteIn the context he is rather just focusing on the work regarding definite descriptions. Chapman finds it amusing that at long last the implicatum is seen to be doing hard serious work in philosophy -- one of those "perennial" themes, like "definite descriptions". Indeed, but a definite desciptor is just a "the", so I would be damned if Grice's implicatum gadget will not serve us to understand "the".
When Grice writes:
"The denial of an if-clause needs to be interpreteed as denying not the truth-condition ((read, really, conventional meaning)), but the implicatum, as well, which attaches to an isolated use of the embedded clause" ((eg. the protasis)). Hence his example:
If you were in Seattle, you couldn't have been cleaning the Augean stables.
In this case, it's the apodosis.
A: I was in Seattle all summer.
B: Nice.
A: Not really -- cleaning the Augean stables.
B: How come. If you were in Seattle, and the Augean stables are in Greece, you couldn't have been cleaning the Augean stables, unless you ENSURING that the Augean stables be cleaned. Or something.
A: You bore me.
Re: his previous mention of maximal scope, it refers to his analysis of "The king of France is not bald" as:
A: The king of France is bald.
B: Is NOT!
B implicates that there IS a king of France and that he is not bald.
Yet, the formula can only have "not" as maximal scope.
The negation of "(ix)Kx & Bx", where K is king and B is bald can only have maximal scope, not Aristotelian minor scope at the level of the copula or predicate. It's CONTRADICTION, not CONTRARINESS we mean (strictly).
So he needs to EXPORT "there is a king of France" outside the scope of "not". So that "there is a king of France" is immune to negation. This is implicatum. That's why he expresses his concern as he does in this, sadly, his Valedictory Essay:
"((Is a)) a nonconventional implicature ((such that it)) should always possess maximal scope. When a sentence which, used in isolation, standardly carries a certain implicatum, is EMBEDDED in a certain (syntactic) context, must the EMBEDDING operator be interpreted ONLY as working on the 'truth-conditions' ((read "conventional meaning")) of the EMBEDDED clause, or may it on occasion be INTERPRETED as governing, as well, the conversational implicatum of the EMBEDDED clause? Only if an EMBEDDING operator may, on occasion, be taken as governing not the truth-condition ((or "conventional meaning" of, say "the")) but the implicatum can my account be made to work."
I don't think he saw the thing as so crucial as he makes it sound. In "Aspects of Reason" he has a similar false alarm: "Beware!". In the end he was pretty confident that, with a tweak there, and another tweak yonder, it's Holy Grice all right -- The Grice, as Bayne told me, is always right. Or something.