Thank you, McEvoy, for your charming reply! Which I'll read and re-read. I take
the point of the emphasis, which is very serious (and not boring) and, shall,
we say, implicatural, in nature. I notice that
Trask, possibly a Griceian, likes to use 'implicate' quite a bit. And, mind,
it may all well boil down (metaphorically) to it -- if not specifically re: the
pair of utterances that originated the thread.
But consider:
In some cases, moving the adverbial creates an ill-formed unsyntactical
utterance or invites the wrong implicature.
R. L. Trask uses this example:
i. She decided to gradually get rid of the teddy bears she
had collected.
The expression "gradually" splits the infinitive "to get".
However, if the expression were moved, where could it go?
Cfr.
ii. She decided gradually to get rid of the teddy bears she had
collected.
This might implicate (to use Grice’s and Sidonius’s term of art) that the
*decision* was gradual.
Or cfr.:
iii. She decided to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected
gradually.
This seems to implicate, again using Sidonius's and Grice's term of art, that
it was *the collecting process* which was gradual.
Then we could have:
iv. She decided to get gradually rid of the teddy bears she had
collected.
This sounds rather awkward to Grice’s ears, as it splits the complex expression
"get rid of" ("which is a shame," Grice adds for effect -- "to split such a
renowned idiomatic expression."
We may also have:
v. She decided to get rid gradually of the teddy bears she had
collected.
As it happens, Trask considers this almost as "unwieldy" as its immediate
predecessor.
Then we could have:
vi. Gradually, she decided to get rid of the teddy bears she had
collected.
This may seem to implicate, however, that her decision *or* the fact that she
will get rid of her teddy bears is gradual (or both, obviously).
The sentence can be rewritten to maintain its original implicature (if it had
one), however, by using a noun or a different so-called syntactical 'aspect' of
the verb, or by looking for a synonym for "get rid":
vii. She decided to get rid of her teddy bear collection gradually.
viii. She decided she would gradually get rid of the teddy bears she
had collected.
ix. She decided to rid herself gradually of the teddy bears she
had collected.
Fowler notes that Griceian options should always be available but he does
question whether it is worth the trouble, “if all that we happen may risk is
this or that otiose, if subtle, Griceian implicature.”
Cheers,
Speranza
