Cream in his Coffee

Leezenberg, who wrote, "Contexts of Metaphor", has problems in finding the right one for Grice, out of the blue, in Harvard, in 1967, uttering

You're the cream in my coffee.

Leezenberg writes:

"I take issue with this approach [...] by Professor Grice, which argues that metaphorically expressed contents are particularized conversational implicatures, and therefore by definition cannot be asserted. [...] I do not simply postulate my own views in opposition to others, but I argue for them at length and on the basis of numerous examples. Thus, I do not simply reject Grice's approach, but rather check in some detail (L 2001, p. 114-8) whether metaphor fits any of the familiar diagnostic criteria for conversational implicature." Which was interesting to hear.

Let's revise what those familiar diagnostic criteria are.

I'll follow Levinson (_Presumptive Meanings_) here, as applied to Grice's example:


(1) You're the cream in my coffee.

+> You're my pride and joy.


Levinson's criteria are 6 -- to which I'll add one from Davis, making that 7:


Criterion I.
Defeasibility, or cancellability.

Levinson: "the property of being an inference defeatable by the addition of premises".


(2) You're the cream in my coffee
_but_ since I like my coffee black,
mind YOU: I do not mean to imply that
you are my pride and joy,
or anything of the sort,
you conceited little thing!

Criterion II. Nondetachability:
Any expression with the same coded content will tend to carry the same implicatures (a principled exception has to be made for manner implicatures).

(3) You're the salt in my stew.
+> You are my pride and joy.

Here I am assuming that Grice's version, "You _are_ the cream in my
coffee", is truth-conditionally equivalent to the abbreviated and better --
from a prosodic point of view -- form: "You_'re_ the cream in my coffee" of
the DeSylva-Brown-Henderson song, and that the authors
(DeSylva-Brown-Henderson) intend "You're the cream in my coffee, you're the
salt in my stew" -- the first line of the song -- as featuring two
co-referential expressions.

Criterion III. Calculability:

The more or less transparent derivation of the inference from premises that include the assumption of rational conversational activity:

(3) I see Utterer said "You're the cream in my coffee".
I see that involves categorial falsity.
I see the contradictory of "You're the cream in my coffee"
("You're _not_ the cream in my coffee") is a _truism_.
That _cannot_ be what Utterer is trying to get across.
The most likely supposition is that the Utterer is
attributing to the Addressee [me] some feature
in respect of which the Addressee [referent of "You"]
resembles (more or less fancifully) the cream in
the Utterer's coffee. (After Grice, _Studies_, p.34).

Criterion IV.
Non-conventionality: T
he noncoded nature of the inferences and their parasitic dependence on what is coded.

(4) You're the lemon in my tea

(discussed by C. James, _Contrastive Analysis_, Longman) as the equivalent,
for a British target, of the American metaphor).

Criterion V. Reinforcability.
It is often possible to add explicitly what is anyway implicated with less sense of redundancy than would be the case if one repeated the coded content (Sadock 1978, Horn 1991):

(5) You're the cream in my coffee
You're the salt in my stew
You will always be my necessity
I'd be lost without you.

(As the song goes). It _does_ sound terribly redundant to _me_ but presumably _not_ to the audience of Sylva-Brown-Henderson.

Criterion VI. Universality.

Because the inferences are derived ultimately from fundamental considerations of rationality, we expect a strong tendency to universality (unlike with coded meanings, of course); conversational implicatures are motivated, not arbitrary.

(6) Tu etes la creme de mon coffee (Deleuze, to Ricoeur).

French equivalent of (1).

Criterion VII. (from W. A. Davis, _Implicature_, Cambridge Studies in
Philosophy -- drawing on Grice, p.39). Indeterminacy.

(7) A: You're the cream in my coffee.
B: What d' you mean?
A: Well, I'm not _really_ sure, I guess.

Leezenberg writes: "I do not simply reject Grice's approach, but rather check in some detail (L 2001, p. 114-8) whether metaphor fits any of the familiar diagnostic
criteria for conversational implicature." If Leezenberg checked and rejected Grice's approach, I guess some of the following applies?

i. I checked, too, but incorrectly,
ii. "indeterminacy" applies not only to
pragmatic utterances but to utterances
in pragamtics! :)
iii. I belong in the Grice Club.

Etc.