Grice on quasi-demonstratives

-- a footnote to "South of France".

Carston considers:

"On the top shelf"

as short for:

"In case you are so hungry, and indeed looking for that jar of marmelade, you should be informed that it (i.e. the jar of marmelade) is situated on the top shelf of the cupboard you are making a mess of".

Grice considers:

"the top shelf"

----

and similar expressions as involving a misleading "the".

"Surely there are many top shelves involved," he would say. What we need is a quasi-demonstration, so that we introduce the relevant feature

phi

such that

phi

works as a quasi-demonstrative,

rendering the logical form of "The jar of marmelade is on the top shelf" as slightly more explicit, even if more boringly so.

(Grice, "Presupposition and conversational implicature," WoW. This was way before Kaplan was modernising talk on demonstration, with his dthis and dthat).