Relevance and unspoken assumptions

In a David Brooks NYT op-ed column (“Après Rahm, Le Déluge”) of a week ago:

The Chicago school system is a classic case of a bloated, inefficient Economy II organization. The average Chicago teacher makes $76,000 a year in a city where the average worker makes $47,000 a year. Rising school costs have helped push the system deep into the red. Meanwhile, the outcomes are not good.

This passage begins by asserting that the Chicago system is bloated and inefficient. The next sentence asserts that the average Chicago teacher makes 1.6 times as much as the average Chicago worker, leaving us to calculate by Gricean relevance that the second sentence follows the first because teachers’ salaries are bloated, bloated implicating that these salaries should be much smaller (perhaps around the average worker’s salary, or even less). All of these are arguable propositions.

Calvin x 3

From the Best of Calvin and Hobbes site, three strips: on inattention and question-answering; on phone answering as a linguistic routine; and on indirect speech acts.

Knowing

In a comment on my recent Pogo posting, Bob Richmond gave a link to a posting of his (“Hum a few bars and I’ll fake it”) on the joke template that begins with the question “Do you know X?” and has some variant of the “Hum a few bars” reply as the punch line. (Several of these are from comic strips.) The joke turns on the ambiguity of the verb know, a use-mention ambiguity, and the speech-act ambiguity of Do you know? questions.

Dishes

In today’s Zits, Jeremy insists on understanding dishes as the plural of dish and nothing else (as a way of avoiding work), so as to put his mother into the position of having to inventory the contents of the dishwasher or refer to these contents with a phrase like everything in the dishwasher:

He’s messing with words here, deliberately disregarding dishes as a label for a higher-level category of artifacts, as in do/wash the dishes (and in fact in compounds like dishwasher and dishcloth, where the first element dish is understood as a reference to this higher-level category; a dishwasher washes dishes in the broad, not the narrow, sense). Dishes are the central members of this category, but it includes a lot more than dishes.

A little more on optative if … only

In my brief posting on optative if … only, in examples like

If only you had asked, I would have explained.
If you only had asked, …
If you had only asked, …

I focused on the truncated (protasis-only) versions of such examples and how they have become conventionalized as free-standing optatives. But I merely asserted that all the examples, truncated or not, were in fact optatives, distinct from ordinary conditionals with only in them. That assertion — which amounts to a claim that these sentences have a special sense or use of only in them (as distinguished in the OED) — could use some defense.

Warning signs

From the “Metropolitan Diary” feature of 26 April in the New York Times (it’s a regular Monday thing): “Signs of the Times”, a wry poem by Mel Glenn about the following warning posted on the Q train:

Assaulting M.T.A. personnel
is a felony punishable by
up to 7 years in prison.

Why would the MTA [here I do not follow the NYT's fanatic attachment to periods in initialisms, though I do wonder what was on the actual sign] caution people against assaulting its personnel? Would potential assaulters be deterred by the warning? Would they not already understand that assault is a serious matter?

Glenn’s poem went on to suggest:

Maybe other signs should be
displayed as well:

Do not trip strangers on the
street.

Avoid attacking people who sell
flowers.

Refrain from accosting
reference librarians.

[I would add: And do not deface subway signs.]

The implicated event of pizza-eating

I have a large and ever-growing collection of notes to myself on linguistic topics. This morning I came across one of these notes, a slip of paper with the following example on it:

(1) They came by bearing pizza, after which we watched The Music Man.

(The note doesn’t identify the source of the sentence or the date when I collected it.)

On the most straightforward reading, this sentence has a summative relative clause, “after which we watched The Music Man“, in which the relativizer which refers to the event of some people’s coming by bearing pizza; that is, (1) asserts describes two events, an arrival-with-pizza event and a movie-watching event, occurring in that order. In still other words, (1) is paraphraseable as

(2) They came by bearing pizza, after which event we watched The Music Man.

(In fact, some usage writers insist that (1) is unacceptable, because which has no noun antecedent in the sentence — so that (1) is “vague” — and that something like the clunky (2) must be used instead. See the summatives posting linked to above.)

And now for a subtlety. Although (1) describes only two events, most readers will understand (1) as implicating a third event, of pizza-eating, intervening between the other two, and the author of (1) surely intended this implicature. A nice little case of how sentences can end up conveying more than they literally mean. (The sentence is true if no event of pizza-eating occurred on the occasion in question.)