In a message dated 10/18/2015 11:07:53 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Can implicatura, or its derivatives, be used to reverse the
Argentina-Ireland scores in the rugby?
Well, there are FOUR ways:
(a) Grice would use 'disimplicature', not implicature ("a related concept,
but not identical"). Disimplicature used to be called short-circuit
implicature, but Grice restricts the use of 'disimplicature' for the cases of
'reversal' that McEvoy is talking about.
(b) 'rugby' can mean various things. It was a Norse city (hence the ending
-by): it became short for 'Rugby foot-and-hand-ball game'. Reversals may
vary as to what we mean by the expression. Originally, it means the
"fortified place of a man called *Hroca".
(c) Grice mentions the example of 'golf' in the William James lectures,
that can aptly be translated to rugby hand-and-foot-ball game. Grice's
utterance is:
i. Palmer gave Nicklaus quite a beating.
which compares to:
ii. Argentina gave Ireland quite a beating.
Grice allows that, via disimplicature ('irony', to be more precisely), (i)
can be used, in a reversed way, to mean quite the opposite. While the
expression (i) means that Palmer vanquished Nicklaus with some ease, it may be
used to mean
iii. _Nicklaus_ vanquished Palmer with some ease.
and a fortiori
iv. Ireland vanquished Argentina with some ease.
(d) Strictly, it was the members of Argentina's rugby foot-and-hand ball
game team that vanquished the members of Ireland's rugby foot-and-hand ball
game team with some ease. That's the whole point for Ireland (or Argentina,
for that matter) to have a rugby foot-and-hand ball game team in the first
place: a team allows Argentina to do for Argentina what Argentina cannot do
for herself, to wit: vanquish Ireland at a match of rugby foot-and-hand
ball game with some ease. ("A country cannot play cricket," Grice's example
is: "human beings can" -- thus, if the original utterance is taken literally
as an example of a category mistake -- since Ireland can NOT play a rugby
foot-and-hand ball game -- then the scores can also be reversed THAT way.
Cheers,
Speranza
* Argentina scored two late tries to seal an emphatic 43-20 win over
Ireland in the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals and continue the southern
hemisphere's domination of the tournament. Ireland's record of never having
reached
the semi-final of a World Cup continued as Argentina scored four tries
through Juan Imhoff (2), Matias Moroni and Joaquin Tuculet. Ireland battled
back from a first-quarter deficit of 17-0 with tries from Luke Fitzgerald and
Jordi Murphy making it a three-point game at one stage, but the Pumas
powered away in the closing stages to repeat their 1999 and 2007 World Cup
victories over the Irish.
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