McEvoy would (but then perhaps he would not) say that, if Dylan's speech (on
Nobel Prize night) is "uttered," as Grice would have it, by an "utterer," as
Grice would have it, different from (or 'than,' as Grice would NOT have it)
Dylan, the implicatures are 'meta.' ("Meta-implicatures," for long).
It all re-started, recently, when R. Paul shared with this forum a link from
the BBC with the headline (one should have to re-check this) along the lines,
"Dylan is delivering a speech." I was curious enough (as the English say -- I
never understood this usage of 'enough' -- it sounds especially rude in
collocations like, "Speranza was kind enough to..." when I find it VERY kind of
me -- nothing 'enough' about it) to visit the link R. Paul provided, and,
although one should have to double-check all this, there was a bit of a
'contradictio,' as Leibniz would have it. For we had:
i. Dylan has submitted his speech.
And then you read the body of the BBC piece and it reported an utterance by
Dylan:
ii. I am speechless.
(at being awarded the prize, etc.). McEvoy, while a friend of semantic
parsimony ("should we multiply senses of 'speech' beyond necessity?") might
argue that the BBC headline, "Dylan has submitted his speech", and Dylan's "I
am speechless" AEQUI-vocate. Incidentally, 'aequi-vocate' was Grice's favourite
verb. He used it LITERALLY: 'aequi-' means EQUAL, same, as in 'the exact same'
(an overinformativeness implicature there) and 'vocate' is from 'vox': same
vox. Therefore, by implicature, same sense. But it may be argued that Dylan, in
uttering (ii), as reported by the BBC piece, is being what Grice calls
'hyperbolic'. It's not like Dylan lost his ability to speak, or worse, that he
is without a speech, since, well, the headline reads that he has delivered one.
Now Geary has offered his implicatures of what is behind all this.
According to logic, the possibilities are at least three:
iii. Dylan will not make reference, in his speech, to either Popper or Grice.
iv. Dylan will make a passing reference to Popper.
v. Dylan will make a passing reference to Grice.
If (v) happens to be the case, we may go on to analyse the implicatures.
vi.
Dear Academy,
Thanks for the prize, and to Grice, for giving us a framework to analyse all
the implicatures behind my lyrics for which, incidentally, you are awarding me
this prize. I am also grateful that you were able to find a singer to sing one
of my songs for the 'get-together'. I shall try to make my speech
implicature-free; but Grice says this is impossible, so I shan't. I am the
recipient of the Nobel prize for literature, because, lyrics ARE literature --.
It might be argued that the fact that I _sing_ my lyrics add an implicature (or
two) to them. As Cole Porter used to say, "When I wrote and composed "Everytime
we say goodbye", I managed to add an implicature to the lyric, "but how strange
the change from major to minor", since, well, I changed the key from major to
minor." In a way, my lyrics -- as "set to music," as they say -- are Porterian
and not just Griceian in nature. My lyrics have been called 'folksy,' which is
just fine. Grice, in "Method in philosophical psychology," was a strong
defendant of folk-psychology, and he would call his own theory 'folksy'. The
phrase, 'folksong,' has its own enemies, though. "I never heard a horse sing,"
someone said, implicating thereby that ALL song is FOLKsong. The blame is not
on the English, but the German. The Germans coined 'volklied' and 'kunstlied',
folksong and art song. "The foggy foggy dew," for example, is a folksong,
since, who knows who wrote and compose it? Apparently, someone from Suffolk,
England -- Britten loved it and recorded as sung by Peter Pears, with Britten
his self at the piano --. But "The ash grove" is not a folksong -- since, while
Welsh, it can be traced to a specific lyricist and composer. In opera, it is
well known that there is a paradox: what comes first, the tune, or the lyric?
In my case, this should not worry us much, since, by Leibniz's law, Dylan =
Dylan. But I will tell you, they come "at the same time". "At the end of the
day," what we have is a 'song,' not a lyric. A Griceian might argue, and even a
Popperian might argue that one LYRIC can be set to at least TWO tunes (never
the case with me), which would falsify what I have just said -- or not, of
course. Worse, a Popperian, or even a Griceian, might argue, and perhaps
rightly, that one same tune may have at least two different lyrics. One comes
to mind easily, "Raining, raining, raining". This was a popular song during the
Great War, a protest song -- as this song that you will hear after this speech
is often called. It was a marching soldiers' song to THE TUNE OF "Holy, holy,
holy", the well known C. of E. hymn, if you heard of it, or even if you
haven't. My lyrics -- and my tunes -- have more or less the same roots.
Although I am not a New Yorker, and wrote most of my lyrics (and set them to
music, AT THE SAME TIME) while living in New York. I was told that this should
not be TOO LONG a speech. But if it has helped you to understand the
complexities behind all the labels I have been given for what I have done, and
all the commentary that me receiving ("I" receiving?) this prize has provoked,
I should be more than happy. Aristotle, as Grice tells us, says that you cannot
be "more than happy," since happiness is the greatest good -- but then he never
got the Nobel! Cheers! And God bless you all!
Cheers,
Speranza
