A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

Oh, not another exegesis of Davidson's exegesis of Grice!

Davidson: "There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what philosophers ... have supposed ... We must give up the idea of a clearly
defined shared structure which language users master and then apply to
cases"

Davidson, 'A nice derangement of epitaphs', in
P.G.R.I.C.E.

One may like to distinguish between 'LANGUAGE', as my tutor A. Blanco, would go, and 'A LANGUAGE'.

Davidson's quote seems really about 'a language', like, I take, 'English' or 'Spanish' - if not 'Esperanto', or Grice's Deutero-Esperanto.

Then there's 'Language' as the platonic idea that English and Spanish partake of.
Davidson is discussing philosophers's dicta, so, although he uses 'a language' he seems to be making a general point about 'language'.

But back now to Malaprop's language.

How should we understand a malaprop pragmatically?

Must we say that, by uttering

"a nice derangement of epitaphs"

Mrs Malaprop MEANT that x was a nice derangement of epitaphs, or must we correct
her, and report her as having MEANT that x was a nice arrangement of
epithets?

Don't say, depends on context. Well you could say it, and it surely depends on context. Making what you say a truism.

A malaprop is like a solecism, only different.

Mrs M: That's a nice derangement of epitaphs.
Mrs N: You mean, perhaps, 'a nice arrangement of epithets'?
Mrs M: Precisely.

Mrs M is being modest and takes Mrs N as revising her own (Mrs M's) psychological attitudes. Mrs M takes Mrs N's correction that, as for 'derangement' and 'epitaph', those were like 'slips of the tongue', and that what she had in mind (meant) was indeed 'arrangement' and 'epitaph'.

There's however a different context, with Mrs M replying: 'I mean what I say, don't I? The chap's well dead anyway, ain't he? So why not let'im have his epitaphs,
an' nicely deranged they are too!'

There's a third level. After all, the character of 'Mrs Malaprop' stems from a novel by Sheridan, and note that 'a nice derangement of epitaphs' is the example cited Fowler's Concise Oxford Dictionary as sort of _defining_ 'malaprop'.

I would believe that the character of Mrs Malaprop goes with the first of the two conversational contexts here, i.e. that the lady is glad to be corrected.

Mrs Malaprop connects with Rev Spooner, an actual [Oxford] figure. Both 'malaprops' and 'spoonerisms' are treated under figures of rhetoric, ie. as INTENTIONAL devices (Malaprop is a literary invention, and most of Spooner's quotes are apocryphal anyway). As for 'slips of the tongue' (lapsus linguae in Latin), they concern deep psychoanalytic (Freudian) waters, and, perhaps, the limits of reason and rationalisations.

Etc.