Compositional Grice

Oddly, Grice composed music. In the manner of Bartock, and Debussy. VERY impressionistic.

This from

http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~pietro/research/CruelHomework.pdf

"Provide a compositional semantic theory that associates each of the following word-strings with a correct truth-condition (or in the case of ambiguity, correct truth-conditions) in a way that also helps explain any entailments due to meaning. Be sure to specify the domain in a theoretically perspicuous and metaphysically respectable way. And see if you can show that the theory is acquirable, in conditions of typical experience, given minimal nativist assumptions."

(1)


The sky is blue.


(2)

Snow is white

Grass is green (Cited by Dale, "The theory of meaning", ch. iv)

---- Oddly, Dale rightly notes that Swedish is a complex language. He doesn't say it in those words but is refuting (I take it) Chomsky's little obscure reflections on 'cognise' --. And for that matter, Dale's thesis starts with a Finn version of "Snow is white", which I should be able to quote or disquote here.

---

The online source goes on:


(3)

It is blue, and they are white.

--


(4)

My house, whose six rooms were painted white, was painted blue.


(5)

This book is heavy, though it was favorably reviewed, and that one is available everywhere.


(6)

If every unicycle has wheels, then these unicycles have wheels.


(7)

Beavers build dams, and poems are written by fools like me.


(8)

Beavers built those dams if and only if those dams were built by beavers.


(9)

Birds can fly, except for those that can’t; and pigs fly, except for those that don’t.


[That one above is genial --. Speranza]

(10)

Every girl who saw a dog or a cat will get cake or ice cream unless she cleaned her room.


(11)

While neither of us will go, I would go if I were you, and you would go if you were me.

[Good -- Grice plays with things like these in "Actions and Events" -- Grice is saying that if we go by the things we _say_ rather than 'mean' we ARE at a loss. "I've just come from Persia. They seem to be very worried about the fall of the regime". "They" "surely the Persians", Grice writes.

---


(12)

You may not go if it is raining.


(13)

The weather here is lousy today.


(14)

Pat married Chris, and we all drank champagne for an hour.

(15)

Everyone drank the first glass in five minutes.


(16)

Sherlocke Holmes said that if you ask the average man’s wife whether he thinks
that Hamlet grew up with his parents in Denmark, she’ll say that he rarely thinks.

(17)

This government does little for the sake of average Americans whose children will inherit the massive debt that is accumulating.


(18)

Socrates was mortal and exists no more.

(19)

Plato died, is dead, or will die.

(20)

Triangles differ perceptibly from circles, but geometric figures are imperceptible.

(21)

Aristotle was bald.

(22)

Aristotle was a bald linguist.

(23)

France is hexagonal, and it is a republic, though it used to be a monarchy.


(24)

France is a hexagonal republic

[genial -- after Austin and Strawson with a nod to the implicature].


(25)

My round square has a colorless green idea attached to each of its right angles.

A tribute this to the man who superseded Otto Jesperson for good.

----