Capt. H. P. Grice, R. N. -- some sailor's slang

Kramer: "In Natural English, the sentence, "She got married and had a child" would be uttered by a competent U only if the events happened in that order. That does not mean that we cannot agree to converse in a temporary idiolect, "Please state her marital and chil-bearing history, in that order, regardless of the order of events?. That's an instruction not to cancel an implicature, but to use and-L instead of and-S in my reply."

This is interesting. When Horn was writing his essay on implicature for his Handbook of Pragmatics, we were discussing that, and we reviewed Grice on this. So we checked with Grice's treatment of "She striped and went to bed" (or words) in "Presupposition and conversational implicature" (in the original reprint). That section was omitted in the WoW reprint. The result: Horn had to quote from both WoW and the original reprint. Ah well. If memory serves me (this is a hateful cliche -- if memory does not serve you, it's just NOT memory, not unserving memory), Grice has a discussion, there, of the 'ampersand'. He suggests to use "&" to mean "and-L" but changes his mind immediately. Words: "This won't do, because implicata tend to attach to things like the plague, and I wouldn't be surprised if I start receiving letters from my Aunt"


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"Dear Paul,

Thx for let. It was good to hear from you. V. good, indeed. Went to a concert yesterday: Albert Hall. Noisy & v. crowded. I smtimes wonder why I go to sch places. We ate at Carlo's & took a taxi to Leicester Sq, since, well Pat. was expecting us there & we didn't want to let Pat. down. Saw 4 films in the last 6 days. Boring. Hope things are well w/you & that you'll write back. Or not,

Your dearie auntie."

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Grice notes that, as she uses, Auntie, while using the 'ampersand' which logicians restrict for purely commutative 'and', attaches to it the implicatum that things reported follow the order of report:

"we ate at Carlo's & took a taxi to Piccadilly".

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Kramer:

"These are, after all, two different logical devices, and we can agree that I will use one rather than the other, that the default meaning of "and" does not apply, because, thanks you your instruction, I am not responding in Natural English."

Yes. Oddly, Gowers wrote a pamphlet, "Plain English" and Ogden one on "Basic English". Actually, I have for some reason, next to me, his silly "New Testament" in Basic English. That's different from "Natural" English, still -- but one does wonder, as Gowers did, that civil servants (who dictate those questionnaires) don't really talk (plain) English.

Kramer:

"In short, the sentence is only "abstract" in Logiclandian. In Natural English, it is sequential, because that's how we Anglophones do things. I believe the same would be true if we agreed that we would only us "funny" to mean "funny ha-ha." (If you've seen Goodfellas, you know that could be a salutary rule.) We would be changing the language, removing a "word" from the lexicon. I think and-L and and-S are analogues of funny-H and funny-P. Or, more precisely, I believe they can be so treated coherently, given that to some extent these divisions are, to my mind, arbitrary."

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Yes. I haven't elaborated on the etym. of 'fun' because I don't think I know it. In the vernacular, there's really no problem there, I expect:

I would translate funny-H as 'amusant', in French. "amusant" IS a trick of a word in that you never know what 'sense' it is supposed to have. My favourite use of "amusant" is by Liza Minnelli in "Cabaret", when she is being hosted at that mansion by Maximilian von Whatever. And she keeps talking in French, with the twang of the Sally Bowles, daughter of 'some sort of an ambassador' she is:

"Tres amusant", she says. In that context, she seems to find what SHE says 'amusant'.

As for funny-peculiar, I would need to study this. I would not be surprised in the word was first used in "Piers Plowman" (most words were first used in Piers Plowman, it would seem) to mean 'amusant' and THEN, in "Anacr. Roman dela Rose -- Clifton MS", to mean, 'peculiar'. At this stage, one HAS to agree with Grice,

---- I don't give a hoot what the dictionary says

For the dictionary will say very stupid things that one (a philosopher, or in fact, any intelligent man or person or both) has to IGNORE.

For suppose they have:

(sense 2): 'peculiar'

1432 Anacr. Roman de la Rose Clifton MS

funn est her Rosalyn, ye knighte shew

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I mean, why are we to suppose that IN THAT Silly Quote it's 'peculiar' what is meant? It's still 'amusing' to me!

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Kramer:

"(You have told me that great academic battles have been fought over the borders between what is said and what is meant, but you have not said why. Your two favorite countries - I assume - fought a war over some rocks off your coast. What, besides the survival of Argentina's junta, turned on its outcome?)"

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Yes, I believe Horn makes reference to the Border Wars between Scotland and England. Over the Tweed, I expect.

Oddly, good you mention, 'what is meant' and 'what is said'. Because there's also 'what is implied' -- And that was precisely my point about the bandaged leg. It would seem that in the case of NOT what is said (he displays a bandaged leg) we do NOT *NEED* the (often) otiose distinction between what is implicated (or implied if you mustn't) and what is said and what is meant, because -- first: nothing was said.

But also because Grice explicitly has "mean" as one of the duties that 'implicate' is supposed to 'do'.

Grice considers:

U displays bandaged leg.

What he MEANS is what we care. Never mind 'imply'. What he means, as a response to a squash invitation (we do need the context) is:

"I won't be playing squash".

"More dubiously", he writes: "I have a bad leg".

"But NOT", he writes, "My leg is bandaged".

--- for surely A can see that for himself -- actually he won't, unless U shows the leg. (Cfr. Ditty, "Kiss me goodnight, Sargent Major -- show a leg.").

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By the same token, it would be overinformative to add, "My LEFT leg is bandaged", I expect, and say it.

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Kramer:

"The question about "Y despues" (I see it with and without the accent mark - what's up with that?) assumes that Spanish has been tweaked so that "y" always means "and-L" and so never means or implicates sequence. In that version of the language, things that would sound bad in Español natural would not sound so awkward. It was a bad example, I think, for me to use."

No. It was a good example. I don't know too many furrin lingos. But there's 'et' in Latin, and 'kai' in Greek. I hate 'kai'. It is rough, and too primitive in sound. I read that the original Indo-European root is more like the Latin 'et', and indeed there are ways OTHER than 'kai' to say 'and' in Greek. I wouldn't know if you CAN use 'kai' in Greece today -- with all those Turks having brought lovely new idioms to the country and lingo.

Similarly my knowledge of Old Irish is pretty null (i.e. it's a nice zero), so I would not know if they have verbalised things different. But what we need is some primitive lingo to make the verbal realisation: kai for 'and' and kui for 'and then'.

In fact, von Wright (discussed by Grice, in "Actions and Events," PPQ 1986 -- and I intend to quote from that, at some point -- discussed 'and then' -- I owe a recent reminder of this to B. Aune, elsewhere. I think von Wright uses:

p @ q

to mean "and then"

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von Wright was (at the time) into a logic of events -- hence the treatment of von Wright's views in "Actions and events". So von Wright wants to formalise some basic connections and relations between reports of events. "q" brought about because of "p" and vice versa; 'p' and 'q' being simultaneous, subsequent, or what have you. VERY clever chap, von Wright. To think that he spoke Finnish as his mother tongue (blame his mother) endears him to my heart.

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Kramer:

"We return, I think, to definitions as prescriptive or descriptive. If we can describe something done well, we can then prescribe that anyone who wants to do that thing well emulate that description. But does that change the nature of the practice from "how it's done" to "how it must be done"? When English speakers want to indicate and-S, we say "and." It's what we do, unless context indicates that "and," standing alone, would be ambiguous, as "funny" may be, but usually is not."

Yes. Oddly, if you think of it (and even if you don't), I expect the entry for 'and' looks like a confusing silly thing in a good dictionary. For 'and' originally meant 'contra' or 'versus'. As in "The match was of Arsenal and Manchester." In fact, since English is not my native tongue (my tongue is not native but you get my drift), I still can perceive that relic whenever I use 'and' in too loud a voice. There is an element of antagonism to it.

Recall that to 'answer' was to 'and-word', were that was Baeda's (I expect) translation of 'contra-dict'. In German (I learned it a bit) there is "Antworten", which means something very grand, like "Answer". But the Germans use 'und' so we see that they have had their own problems digesting the concept -- and they have failed (and vomit different morphemes for the same underlying root).

So I expect perhaps the Anglo-Saxons used a different, more transparent, particle for current 'and':

I expect something like "het regneth e snowed", i.e. it rained and snowed. Having read the Beowulf, and heard bits of its in Angelina Jolie's recent flop ("Beowulf: the movie"), I would expect a verse involving 'and' to mean 'contra', never plain Logicland "&" or '/\' (I'm glad Korta uses '/\' to indicate the logic 'and' -- it is the sign used by Grice in WoW:ii, and it contrasts nicely with '\/' to mean its correlate, 'or' even in quantificational variants -- that Grice does not use "(x)" or "/\x" and (Ex), '\/x'.

Kramer:

"I don't understand your discussion of my three points on polysemy. Maybe I use the term incorrectly. I am only saying that two logical words can be both homophones and homonyms - spelled and pronounced alike - but that they are still separate logical devices. What do you mean by it? Why isn't "mean" as in "John means him no harm" a different word from "mean" as in "Those spots mean measles." For the spots to intend measles would be a pathetic fallacy."

Yes. What I meant and mean is that senses (1, 2, 3, ..., whatever -- we shouldn't multiply them but what if others do?) ALWAYS carry a logic about them.

We cannot even conceive:

pupulpu:

---- 1. A sort of vase, to display chrisantemums.
---- 2. my mother.

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I.e. in ALL the sense-distinctions I have seen (and I don't care if you call them 'senses': I just mean those things that are usually numbered in dictionaries; or more irritatingly, just separated by a semi-colon -- e.g. "Turk: inhabitant of Turkey; a wanton child" -- discussed by Burchfield, The Making of the OED, Faber) you look for a rationale.

"grog" in English, for example -- my latinist friend's favourite example.

There is some stupid reason, most of the time:

'pate de foie', for example

'foie' -- the reference to the fig, etc.

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Or is it the other way round?

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Horn calls this 'etymythology' because most people don't have any idea as to where the phrases they usually use come from. In a paper he delivered at the prestigious "Elizabethan Club" in New Haven, he credits me for having reported to him that 'spitten image' was thought of by an informant to mean, 'the image reflected on the shooes, after you spit on them, to make them shinier', or something.

But in any case, in most uses of 'fig.' or extended senses, the mechanism is usually taht of an implicatura via metaphor. Surely we are not thinking that a river has a "mouth" -- but we still speak of the 'mouth' of a river. As I told L. M. Tapper, who believes that some senses are good and some are bad -- vide his post, "She has a bee in her bonnet", this blog -- it would do more justice (to the river) to refer to what people refer to as 'the mouth' of the river as the 'arsehole' of the river -- the 'mouth' is usually up in the mountains. The stream flows FROM the mouth to the 'arsehole' as it were. I cannot imagine why people call the 'mouth of a river' a 'mouth'. I suppose they don't know the first thing about physical geography. Fortunately, it is called 'estuary' down where I live (The River Plate).

---- But oddly, some ignorant Italians who settled in the area called it "Bocca" (i.e Italian for 'mouth') -- and "Bocca Juniors" is now the main Argentine football team. The big mouthers I call them.

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So, if I can find a "rationale" for this -- I call it implicatum. That is Grice's strategy in connection with

"an X"

When he provides the three alleged 'senses' -- Kramer's logical devices -- Grice seems to be saying and arguing and taking it for granted as he should -- he is discussing some imaginary philosopher, -- you can call him 'Straw' -- that for this imaginary philosopher there is no important rational link between one sense and the others. In fairness to the imaginary philosopher, he does define senses 2 and 3 in terms of a more basic sense 1, but that's that. Senses 2 and 3 seem 'contradictory', even. And this is what seems to irritate Grice. How can 'an x' sometimes mean 'close link' ("I broke one finger") and sometimes 'remote' ("I read a book")?

--- Etc.

Note that 'an x' concerns quantitas. But most figurative extensions concern qualitas, since they are metaphors. "The mouth of a river" would thus be a metaphor, like "You're the cream in my coffee"

""We are sailing towards the mouth of the river", he said. I objected that if that was the mouth, the river had no teeth. But he, whom I affectionaly recall him as "Capt. R. Sole, RN" said that I should shut "it" -- implicating my mouth, I expect".

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