longer update

[fox]

1.  Not that anyone else is following the drama, but the ugliest part of the Bursar-related situation seems to be over.  We are reestablished on a productive path.  Thank god.  Aside from it driving me to tears last Friday, it actually managed to keep me up for goodish parts of four nights in a row.  My blood pressure and my ulcer are as glad as I am that it's on the mend.

2.  I really feel like I did well on the mock exam.  I looked at section C, but ended up answering three questions from section E:

--Give a detailed description, using diagrams as appropriate, of the movements of the organs of speech in an utterance of the phrase "twice fortnightly".  Indicate the dialect or variety of English that your description reflects.

Wrote two and half pages of that, and added a page and a half of diagrams (lips to velum, including the nasal cavity in one case) and a half-page phone inventory.


-- Explain the difference in the meanings of the following pairs of sentences:

a.  John said Bill was a liberal democrat, and then HE insulted HIM.
  John said Bill was a liberal democrat, and then he insulted him.

b.  Have another drink.  After all, you've finished WORK.
  Have another drink.  After all, YOU'VE finished work.

Wrote about four pages.

-- Give an analysis, using Gricean conversational maxims, of the steps the reader must implicitly go through in order to make sense of the following:

Would you mind not doing that, please?

Wrote about three pages.

Off for drinkies now with some college people.  Hurrah.

Comments

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

John said Bill was a liberal democrat, and then HE insulted HIM.

Let no one claim that reading and writing slash isn't good for improving reading comprehension skills.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

[snort]

No epithets in my essay questions!

[servalan.livejournal.com]

Hey! Glad you had things to write about and that the exam isn't so scary.

Also, for my edification: What is the meaning difference on 2a?

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

I concluded (almost said 'assumed', but I didn't assume at all -- I wrote a whole essay, but you don't care about the details right now) that in the second sentence in 2a, the clauses are parallel, i.e.:

John_i said that Bill_j was a liberal democrat, and then he_i insulted him_j.

(So we can also infer that in that sentence, being called a liberal democrat is not in itself insulting.) Then in the first sentence, the pronouns are emphasized for contrast:

John_i said that Bill_j was a liberal democrat, and then HE_j insulted HIM_i.

Admittedly it's possible to cook up a context where the emphatic pronouns refer the other way -- blah blah something where Bill insulted John, and then John said that Bill was a lib dem etc. -- but absent that context, this is the best reading of these two sentences. (And here, it's less clear whether being called a liberal democrat is or is not insulting.)

[servalan.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see it now.

This is clearly a dialect thing, but I understand it now that you've explained it. Emphasizing both loses the meaning for me. Emphasizing either "he" or "him" [and/or "and" for that matter] would work, but both was sort of a "cancelling out".

Neat.

[And, hey, now you've explained it again. You're going to rock the exam Casbah.]

[mearagrrl.livejournal.com]

OOh, I like question 2, that's fun. Question 3 doesn't actually make any sense to me (the question, not the statement-to-analyze) and..."Twice fortnightly"?!? God, just in case there was ANY confusion that you were in the UK...I'd be so tempted to be all "We wouldn't ever say that phrase where I'm from, see..."

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

H.P. Grice wrote that there are four maxims speakers should observe (and hearers should trust speakers to observe) in conversation: the maxims of quality, quantity, manner, and relevance.

Quality: be truthful.
Quantity: say no more (nor less) than is necessary.
Relevance: be relevant.
Manner: be clear.

So if the hearer is faced with "Would you mind not doing that, please?" and it doesn't make sense, she nevertheless should assume that the speaker has adhered (or believed he was adhering) to the conversational maxims, and can therefore work out what he must have intended. Not my best essay ever, particularly since I didn't get the maxims quite right (I got the names, but fluffed some of the content), but whatever. Mock!

It's true that we wouldn't use "twice fortnightly" in ordinary speech, but we certainly can pronounce it in our dialect of English, and I don't think there are points for cheek, so if I took that question and said "I'm answering for US English, and the movements of the speech organs are nothing, because we don't say that", it wouldn't go well for me. ;-)