Predication in Grice, humans, and animal thought

We were discussing, elsewhere, the bird's squawk, as analysed in Green et al, "Lionspeak", online:

Green et al postulate the transcription:

"Hawk"

We were playing with variants here, and I offered

Hawk-near

to which Kramer aptly made the further point:

Danger-hawk.


---- To clarify my point, if a point it was: I was concerned with Grice's constructivist account of propositions in "Reply to Richards" (this blog, sometime in the past). He notes that it should display a canonical subject-predicate format.

This relates to his alpha-beta example,

"The dog is shaggy" (Grice's shaggy-dog story, as I call it).

alpha: the dog, Jones's dog, Fido.
beta: shaggy, i.e. long-haired.

He focuses on 'predication' -- it's like an intersection of classes alla Venn: the class of long-haired things, and the class of "Fido".

When transferring that account to Green on

Hawk!

I thought something was notably missing. There was reference alright: 'hawk' refers to 'hawk'. But I thought the squawk was yet not properly predicative.

So I suggested, alla J. Bennett, Linguistic Behaviour, last chapters (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973):

hawk-near

My point was merely to illustrate how the utterer would

refer to an item in the environment

and

predicate a 'feature' (hawk is near, hawk is dangerous) to the item.

I note that for the pigeon in Lewis Carroll, she utters:

"Serpent!"

which comes out to mean, "Egg-eater!" -- so one has to be careful about compositional analysis and it's grand to have Kramer's example of

"Chocolate!"

--- (as otiose)

and

"Fire!" as

providing a good opportunity for the punchline to a doubl-act:

"Why did you say "Fire!" when you fell on a vat of chocolate?
-- "Because uttering "Chocolate!" would have been _pointless_." Or stuff.


Or stuff.