The Life and Death of Queen Anne

-------- by J. L. Speranza
-------------- For the Grice Club


----- IN ONE OF HIS INTERESTING COMMENTS TO one my posts, THIS BLOG, L. J. Kramer referred to Queen Anne.

We were discussing Gazdar -- a linguist, but hey, with philosophical leanings. In his PhD for the Dept. of Linguistics at Reading (under Palmer) he expanded on ch. iii of his "Formal Pragmatics" -- on truth-functors beginning with monadic. There are four of them.

Kramer aptly suggested that "And Queen Anne is dead" may be the tag for one of the four options.

Indee, Queen Anne is dead.

But she not ALWAYS (or all-ways, as Henninge wants me to say, in his little infamous satire of Griceanism in "A Grice Bree Party", this blog) was.

Indeed, and since JASON KENNEDY was asking if I played cricket, I prefer to watch. I am an English-Season fan, and there's Lord's for me (only). Ditto for horses, it's Ascot or the Derby or the National (Liverpool).

Now, the Ascot, few know, was created by Queen Anne, so may her memory prosper.

She too created Opera in England. "His Majesty's Theatre" on the Hay market ('mercato di fieno' as the illiterate Neapolitan castrati that would sing there would call it) was originally Her Majesty's theatre.

So, most of the most important things in life were created by Queen Anne, or Anne as Nancy Mitford suggests we call her ("Surely, "Queen" is understood" -- "The English Aristocracy"). She was, however, succeeded.

In most contexts, "The King is dead. Long live the King", implies a referential paradox for the Gricean. For it is 'the king-i is dead. Long live the king-ii' (It would be stupid to suggest otherwise seeing that the first clause contradicts the second). When Anne died, they shouted: "The Queen is dead; long live the King". His (Queen Anne's successor) lost America to England. So there.

Apparently some 15 years after Queen Anne's death, the idiom started, "Queen Anne is dead" meaning, "That's no news".

Cfr. the double 'implicature' of 'inform':

-- truth of what one is informed me about. Said in 1725: "She 'informed' me that Queen Anne was 'alive'". Not a good use. For people should only inform what is true (Grice: WoW:RE: "False 'information' [so-mis-called] is no information". Cfr. "She is no Marilyn Monroe".

-- informativeness status. This complies more with the Category of Quantity than Quality. The addressee should be thought of as 'ignorant' by the utterer. Strawson calls this the "Platitude of Ignorance" -- Theoria 1964 -- before Grice 1967 -- but after Grice 1961 and after Grice 1952, cited by Strawson 1954). Thus: "She 'informed' me that Queen Anne is dead, but I alredy knew that; that's why I mark the situation by the scare-quotes: I wasn't informed at all: what I realised is that she was outdated or wanted to project that persona on me.

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Queen Anne contributed to many things in English history, but it is ironic that only two things that, while important, hardly describe her reign, are most memored (sic) by people. Etc.