I always loved that example.
Grice wants to say that
"Smith is helping the grass to grow", literally: 'assisting the lawn-material to mature' rather than 'dead'.
Things are different with
"Smith is pushing up the daisies'
Because that is an 'established idiom'. Grice is being so jocular there, and with his further remarks on Otto Jespersen, it is just a wonder (God bless wonders) that linguists took Grice seriously to heart.
---
I would like to offer to Jones then the idea that we may look at
"idioms" as defined by Grice
as providing a breach of compositionality.
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It is SO EASY, as Josh Dever does in his essay, "What the hell" -- in Grice club, to realise that there is a simple way, via conversational implicature, to 'save the phenomena' (sozein ta phenomena, if you must).
push-up-the-daisies
is a phrase, as Chomsky would be interested in. It possibly involves some hierarchy in the tree that is enough of a bother to provide.
note that 'the' as in 'the daisies' implicate (as in "the king of France") that they (the daisies) exist.
Now, I want, with Grice, to say that
Smith pushes up the daisies (let's abbreviate to what Carnap has present-tense simple, rather than the more idiomatic continuos, "... is pushing up ...").
means what it says.
As per utterance meaning.
But surely Grice has a tree here:
---------------------- U MEANT
------ WHAT U
--explicitly conveyed
(i.e. that Smith pushed up the daisies).
---------------------------- WHAT U implicated
---------------(as noted by J in his account of how stats already
---------------complicate this area).
--------------------------- "Smith is dead".
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Let us revise the account of compositionality via lambda-function and g-functipn which Dale notes to us he elaborated as he was teaching.
Dale notes, in ch. 4 of his thesis, online:
"More generally, a C[ompositional] S[semantic] T[theory] can be interesting when it is able to show how semantic features of complex expressions might be determined from features of the parts of those expressions and the syntactic arrangement of those parts."
Here Grice would use, as I think he does in "Aspects of reason" that symbol in any respectable keybord:
^
---
Thus yielding
push^up^the^daisies
--- meaning 'die'.
--- A: Is he pushing up the daisies? (+> Is he dead?)
--- "They pushed up the daisies" (+> ?they died)
etc.
---- Grice's phrasing for the record:
(I once edited a newsletter for the Grice Club, which I shared via snail-mail, and must have copies of it somewhere -- I recall Perry liked it! -- one issue was dedicated to "Implicatures of Dying"
-- he joined the feathered choir
-- he kicked the bucket
etc.
Grice writes:
"On the ASSUMPTION (which I make) that the phrase "helping the grass to grow," ulike the phrase "pushing up the daisies," is NOT a recognised idiom, none of the specifications just given of what U meant by S (or by the words, 'I shall be helping the grass to grow') would be ADMISSIBLE as spefications of a timeless meaning or of the applied timeless meaning of S (or of the words constituting the antecedent of S). The words 'I shall be helping the grass to grow' neither mean nor mean here 'I shall be dead'" (WoW:90).
Possibly King Aelfred is to blame. I mean, what makes an idiom an 'established' or 'recognised' one. Note that Grice gets technical about 'established' later on in WoW:VI). It's because of things like the role in English literature, King Aelfred onwards, via Shakespeare, of 'push up the daisies'. Grice seems to be saying that nobody ever utterered, "She pushed up the daisies" _literally_. The metaphor (conversational implicature) has been, if I may use a term that some find pretty hateful, 'fossilised'! Or something!
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Dale goes on:
"And C[ompositioanl] S[semantic] T[ehorie]s that philosophers and linguists have been interested in have generally worked by saying something about each of the simple parts of the members of a class of complex expressions and about the basic syntactic structures of those complex expressions."
SYNTACTIC structures:
"She is pushing up the daisies"
"She pushes up the daisies".
"She isn't pushing up the daisies"
"She doesn't push up the daisies"
SIMPLE PART:
'daisy'. From wiki:
Kingdom: Plantae
(unranked): Angiosperms
(unranked): Eudicots
(unranked): Asterids
Order: Asterales
Family: Asteraceae
Genus: Bellis
Species: B. perennis
---
to push up: to lift.
c.1300, from O.Fr. poulser, from L. pulsare "to beat, strike, push," frequentative of pellere (pp. pulsus) "to push, drive, beat" (see pulse (1)). Meaning "approach a certain age" is from 1937. Meaning "promote" (1714) led to pusher "peddler of illegal drugs," first recorded 1935 in prison slang (earlier it meant "prostitute," 1923). To push (someone) around is from 1923. Phrase push comes to shove is from 1958; to push (one's) luck is from 1911. To push the envelope in figurative sense is late 1980s. Push-up, the exercise, is from 1906;"
"to push up daisies "be dead and buried" is from c.1860."
Well, perhaps not King Alfred then.
"Push-button (n.) is from 1898; adj. sense "characterized by the use of push-buttons" is from 1946."
So, someone in 1860, said,
"Smith is to push up the daisies in Bengal if the conflict ensues" (He will die and be buried"). No.
"to push up daisies" -- 'be dead and buried'.
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It seems to me there is an otiose "and" (+> and then) in 'dead and buried'. Surely it would be odd to have Smith first _buried_ and then _dead_ (but it's not illogical). Whether the common daisy grows in Bengal is perhaps an impertinent question, or not.
Etc.
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Thankyou JL for responding to my request with an interesting problem which would not have occurred to me.
ReplyDeleteI don't know whether I can say much about this in relation to compositionality, but I'll say what I can.
First however, I have to confess to disagreeing with Grice on the meaning of idiomatic expressions, and the relevance of implicature in relation to them.
I am inclined to say that an idiomatic expression has a "literal" meaning, which is the meaning it would have had, had it not acquired some other idiomatic meaning, and that it has an actual meaning which is its meaning given that it did become idiomatic, and hence that implicature is not involved in arriving at the idiomatic meaning (though possibly might be in some other way).
As to grounds for this position, I suggest that we would accept that the fact that someone is pushing up daisies (and my instinct here is not to have the definite article involved) entails (in a not strictly logical manner) that he will not be coming to tea, and that it would not do so if the fact that he is deceased is merely implicated.
Moving on from there to the question whether idioms represent a difficulty for compositionality.
My inclination is to acknowledge that they probably do make a formal semantics more difficult to define, but that compositionality is not the issue.
At some point in a definition of the semantics of an idiomatic language one must recognise the idioms and substitute their idiomatic content.
Exactly when/where this is done depends inter alia upon the identity conditions which apply to idiomatic expressions.
Must they appear literally, or may one use any expression with "the same meaning" or is some intermediate degree of flexibility in order?
This is of a piece with a lot of other problems involving what Frege called indirect use and Quine opaque contexts, in which the value of the enclosing structure depends not merely on the truth value of the constituent but on something like "the proposition" (sinn in Frege) it expresses.
It has seemed apparent to me only recently that these indirect contexts are not all alike, and a single notion of proposition does not suffice to give an account of them.
An example to illustrate this is the ascription of beliefs, since someone may believe and not believe two different ways of expressing the same proposition if he does not know that they do express the same proposition.
This occurs in a recently posted example in which ignorance of one of two names for the same persons is the cause.
So, my feeling about idiom and compositionality, is that idiomatic expressions do not prevent a semantics from being rendered compositionally, though I don't profess to have a conclusive argument.
I perhaps should have said that I am assuming that a compositional semantics is intended to deliver the "central meaning", not the implicatures.
Under that assumption idiomatic expressions would be even less problematic if Grice were correct in taking the idiomatic meaning as an implicature, for then the idioms could be entirely ignored in a composition semantic account of "central meaning".
Roger Jones