[lit-ideas] Re: Ownership and the possessive case
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 15:32:53 EDT
In a message dated 5/6/2009 3:02:35 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
rpaul@xxxxxxxx writes:
'I broke my finger' entails 'I broke a finger,'
-----
Too true.
The page is 38, I think of WOW. Grice's utterance is
"I broke a finger yesterday". The yesterday will provide more exact google
hits if one tries.
He refers to this as 'reverse implicature' I think.
as Opposed to
"I've been sitting in a car all day"
-- no implicature: "my car"
----- versus,
"Jones is meeting a woman this evening" -- not "his" woman.
---
Grice notes:
"the speaker has failed to be specific in a way
in which he might have been expected to
be specific, with the consequence that it is
likely to be assumed that he is not in a
position to be specific"
cfr. Geary, "I love a wife".
Grice asks, 'why'. He provides an explanation in terms of usefulness:
Variations of his example being:
"I found a hole in a roof"
vs.
"I found a hole in _my_ roof"
(Grice uses 'my roof' -- which is relevant here as the mark of the
_possessive_ but his analysis is more simply understood in terms of
'remoteness',
etc.
"one would NOT lend a sympathetic ear
to a philosopher who suggested that there
are _three_ *senses* of the form of
expression, 'an x' "
-- which he goes on to expand.
The way to go is admit, "(Ex)" as the _only_ sense and leaving up to the
intelligence of the addressee who figure out whether something else has been
_implicated_.
My transference of the cases of 'indefinite' pronoun [or article] to
'possessive' pronoun is all my own, mostly.
But I never understood, 'definite article', either:
"the queen of England is charming"
does entail there is a unique queen. But
"the three stooges are silly"
entails there is a unique _trio_?
Quine played with (1x), (2x), (3x), i.e. numerically quantified
expressions, but they evade me as to how can they be _the_ three stooges, i.e.
both
_the_ and _three_.
Note that "I broke the finger" sounds odd if you happen, as most people
do, to have 20 of them.
Perhaps the wisest were not the Italians but the Romans who did without
articles _simpliciter_.
Cheers,
JLS
**************Remember Mom this Mother's Day! Find a florist near you now.
(http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=florist&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000006)
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