The Talking Dummy

--- Grice on Extrapositional Pseudo-Clefts.

----- By J. L. S.
--------- For the Grice Circle

--- IN THIS POST I will address the third part of Kramer's intersting, "I had it; no wait, I've got it", this blog -- where Kramer expands on what he calls the 'non-expletive', 'appository' "it".

I will draw from the logical form of 'exhaustiveness' implicata as per the work of Laurence R. Horn.

amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~zimmermy/teaching/clefts/4-Horn.pdf

The idea is to 'expand' the Logical Form (or LF, for short) of the cases that Kramer analyses for non-expletive (or pleonastic) but 'anticipatory' or 'appository' (but still dummy) 'it':

Kramer had originally propounded his argument with sentences that well deviate Grice's 'be brief':

(i) I find it disturbing that you are a communist

In "I had it; no, wait, I've got it", he opts for he calls my 'thriftier' version:

(ii) "It" disturbs me (that (you are a communist)).

At this point, we need to distinguish between "Strawson-L" and "Strawson-G". "G", in linguistics, stands for "Grammar". In Logic, on the other hand, "L" stands for "Logic". Strawson, who was asking (but never found "it" opportune enough to answer), 'what is 'it', when we say, 'it is raining'?', notes that, "Even since the time of Aristotle -- who wrote in Greek -- Greek speakers, and their readers, have been obsessed with the logic and grammar of subject and predicate."

To complicate things, we are going to use subscript 'L' for logic subject (the one that should interest us, in this trivial pursuit -- for the mediaevals: the trivium comprised: grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and 'G' for 'grammatical subject'.

Kramer writes:

We could probably debate
what is the grammatical
subject of (ii)

What the logical subject is, he implicates, is clear enough:


logically

or "existentially" as he is prone to say,

the “thing” doing the disturbing
is the NP ‘that’-clause

as per the tree:

NP
(that) you are a communist.

Kramer expands on the 'syntax' of the "Fregean" “thought” involved:

S
NP VP
.
.
.
(That)
NP VP
you are a communist) disturbs me.

-- for which he proposes the unedited sequel:

Not:

(iii)A: You think I'm sexy?
-----B: Yes, but that you are a communist disturbs me.

But the clause 'followed' by a "but"-clause:

(iv) That you are a communist disturbs me (bunches) but you can still vote, and oddly that doesn't disturb me as much as it should (cfr. penal code).

Kramer compares 'it' with 'there':

(v) A: There are some apples in the basket.
----B: There? It's right there in front of your nose! The basket.
----A: I expect you are not expecting me to say, "Here are some apples in the basket".
----B: You bore me. Give to me them.

Back to (ii), Kramer suggests it's the 'it'-GS -- i.e. the grammatical-subject slotfiller.

We want

a nominal element

qua grammatical subject
to start or open

our move.

---- At this point then I would insert Horn.

The 'implicature' view holds:

1. The speaker is obviously NOT being brief. All those 'its' do bother.
2. Sometimes he repeats the 'it', "it disturbs me that he is a communist and it amuses me that he never read Marx".
3. Horn notes: "the utterer has already flouted, 'be brief', so don't expect cancellability tests at this stage (1981, cited by Zimmerman above)
4. Rather he is inviting to expand the LF (logical form) with the aid of an implicature that justifies the odd wording. These implicatures can be of various sorts.

(vi)
A: What does it disturb you about me?
B: That you are a communist.
A: Just that?
B: And your questions.

----

In (vi) it is obvious that 'that the addressee is a communist' is not the exhastive range falling within the scope of 'it'. Horn proposes.

vii. It is for Christmas that I played the harp.
viii. It is the harp that I played for Christmas.
ix. It is I who played the harp for Christmas

Each answers a different question, and thus has the retro-activated slot re-filled with the implicatum.

Horn's other example:

(x) It was Peter that slept on the floor.

The logical form, as Horn proposes is,

being

"[it[was[Peter]][DP null-set sub +def that slept on the floor]]

where the implicature is

(xi) (The [only] one that slept on the floor was Peter).

which is of course cancellable.

(xii) A: It was Peter that slept on the floor. I'm not suggesting, of course, that Paul did not.

Cfr.

(xiii) It was a book that Mary read.
⇒ Mary read something (Existence)
Mary read nothing else EXHAUSTIVENESS impl.
+> "(Ax) [Mary read x] & BOOK(x))

----

But "it" is not clear that both cases compare. So there!

I will briefly refer to the concluding remarks by Kramer, as he combines his thoughts on the 'expletive', plenoastic 'it' and the appository 'it':

The ‘natural’ selection pressures
on [talking pirots] will
promote [on these same-self talking pirots]
an usage that is optimally efficient

But people don't go by

(xiv) Me Tarzan. You Jane.

We have evolved from that.

(xv)JANE. Is that you, Tarzan?
--- TARZAN. Honey, it is so nice to see you like that. It is so-ooo-oo nice to come home to! (humming and kissing her).
--- JANE: What is it with you?
--- TARZAN: "It"? What is "it"?

which is back to square one. But not Quite.

Kramer continues:

Grice's conversational maxims
follow from the Efficiency Principle

even if he naively thought that as maxims from a categorically Kantian imperative they would not.

Kramer:

and there is efficiency
in communication

Meden agan
ne quid nimis.
"more than enough is too much."

From the receptive end,

Efficiency entails accommodation
of A’s interpretation engine

At this point, Kramer aptly concedes the Tarskian point: there is object-language, but there is what, for lack of a better word, we can call 'meta-language'.

The 'meta-language' is the oddities of the alleged logical form (LG) such that we play with but we don't want to say they are part of what we _mean_

It is in the benefit of optimal efficiency that apparently 'dummy' (on the face of them) things like 'there', or 'it', that things

can be accomplished by a cue of this
‘meta-language’

The apparent paradox is thus resolved.

While the dummy, as in whist,

carr[is] [no] semantic payload

-- and where he compares it to the waste it would involve to start a new paradigm, a new railway road stops [his experience with 'insurance' trustees -- at the beginning of his post] that "it" does not cause the ‘conversational move’ to violate “be efficient.”

"It" has been used for ages now. The Anglo-Saxons knew it, and if Cicero did not, shame on him!

The grist to the grice at this point concerns the detachability of the implicatum. Spot runs and see spot run (fast) indeed. A paradigm-shift is not expansive, it's just expensive. The theoretician, however, does well in reminding, one and again, to the Strawsonian in us that 'Aristotelian' metaphysics, the logic of our grammar is just, as Russell wanted, a "pretty good" guide to what we mean every time we, conversationally, implicate. (Or something).