Grice The Poet

Usually, people are unimpressed, for some ironic, weird, odd reason about Grice's excellent analyses of Blake's poetry -- in WoW:II, discussed elsewhere in this Club: "Love that never told can be (Blake)").

Allott, who isn't, like I'm not, either, unimpressed, proposes a sort of Griceian analysis for E. E. Cumming's four-line stanza (Grice's stanza by Blake is also originally four line -- but it rhymed).

Cummings wrote:

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Allott is wondering:

--- For Grice, to detect what an utterer (poet, etc.) has implicated, one needs to deliver, first, what the poet has said.

--- The poet said that p, more strictly. We are looking for Grice's counterpart of 'what-is-said' (the truth-conditional propositional content). Only after something, 'p', has been said it makes sense to ask about what the Utterer may have implicated.

"Part of the problem with Cummings"

is that you have to treat him as a chimp (cfr. "give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you", this club), or an infant. But he is neither.

"The first step is to provide the 'semantic' structure of Cumming's dictum":

(i) Anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn't he danced his did."

To simplify matters, let us stick to the last line, which presumably represents a sentence (in Chomsky's mind) complete with LF (logical form) and ILF (interpreted logical form). Chomsky is a nativist; Grice is a naturalist. Both are cognate ('nat', 'nat').

----

(ii) He sang his didn't he danced his did.

"This sentence is controversial. It may, after all, NOT be a sentence."

Grice plays with the loose idiom, "a plastic flower". "Surely a plastic flower is, literally, not a flower, if plastic".

----

He sang his didn't he danced his did.

"One option is to make sense of that"

"He sang his song, didn't he? Not danced his song. No, it wasn't a song-and-dance routine. He sang, didn't he. But he didn't dance, did he?"

By deletion, this yield

He sang his [song, didn't] he? [He] danced [not] his [song], did he?

"Possibly, Cummings chose the shortest by indeed crediting one of Grice's conversational maxims, 'be brief'".