From today's World Wide Words, ed. M. Quinion:
"Peter Norton described the sentence in a Washington Post report on
23 March as "the higher mathematics"."
The two planes that landed without tower help were the last three inbound commercial flights until 5 a.m., the source said.
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Nice. I like this sort of mathematics when it generates implicatures as well: "Henry did predict this recession. Of course, he predicted 7 of the previous 3 recessions."
ReplyDeleteIndeed. I should check with Peter Norton. Indeed, it is best to see the Washington Post thing as just a typo. Although I prefer to narrow down the use of 'typo' to just one 'character' (as in 'A. P. Grice' for "H. P. Grice" in Chomsky, "Aspects of the theory of syntax") rather than a 'three' replacing 'two'. Note that:
ReplyDelete"The two planes that landed without tower help were the last two inbound commercial flights until 5 a.m." sounds clumsy.
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Dale is right that we should focus on real implicatures, rather than 'implicatures'. An implicature is not like a baby. As Reiter wrote in "Computer generated implicature", "an unwanted baby is still a baby, an unwanted 'implicature' is not" (not not a baby, but not an implicature).
What Quinion does is collect opinions by people who must interpret a non-intended 'implicature' as one. Dale's example is thus much more sophisticated:
"Henry predict this recession, along with seven of the past three ones, not including this." Here we get to higher-higher.
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Note that the Washington Post is undavidsonianly misquoting in disquotation, but admittedly,
""The two planes that landed wihtout tower help were the last three [sic] inbound commercial flights until 5. a.m.", an anonymous source called Lucy Walters said (or implicated)."
Or something.