Grice's "Trouble and Strife"

---- by JLS
-------- for the GC

--- KRAMER WANTS TO SAY THAT Grice is not respectful enough of polysemy. The intricacies of utterance-type meaning, however, were such that they concerned him (Grice) for some time. Early in 1948 -- now repr. in WoW -- he writes:

"I can't get on without my trouble and strife".

"A person may object that I'm not using standard English; for after all, 'get on without' is hardly literate."

The idea that a rhyme can be truncated (as when we say, 'mincies') the point is that the rhyme has a reason.

If Grice had the occurrence to refer to his wife by the phrase 'trouble and strife', that is because a wife is supposed to accompany you "through your worst moments" -- and there are other interpretants.

It would be unlikely that 'trouble and strife', qua utterance type, will detach itself of the literal meaning -- brought by 'trouble', 'strife' and 'and' --. The reverberations of the literalness, as Recanati would say (only in French) should not concern us here -- and perhaps nowhere. Etc. Or not.