Mabbe: the pragmatics

I HAVE SEEN, I think, ´mabbe´ as a colloquialism for "maybe". But "maybe", which Brits call "perhaps" is different from "perhaps". Perhaps is French, "perchance", etc. Mabbe, or maybe, on the other hand, is plain may^be.

It strikes me as overinformative by the Gricean maxim.

Mabbe she´s in the kitchen.
------ to use Grice´s example (1961: Where is your wife? In the kitchen or in the garden.

Mabbe she´s in the garden.


The "´s" hides an "is", assertoric indicative mode. The MAY is probabilistic (deontic, "You may not" or not, "it may rain"). A different animal altogether. So, the idea is that

i. Mabbe she´s in the kitchen.

is short for

ii. "IT" may be the case that she IS in the kitchen.

which is longer than

iii. She may be in the kitchen.

The perspicuity of iii springs from the "may" being attached to the only important verb in the clause: the one predicating "location" to the referent of the grammatical subject. It does not create any new anaphoric subject just for the sake of it.

"mabbe" is American, and not translatable to the Romance languages, I would think.

It generates implicatures, which when unintended, fail to even be so!