[Ads-l] Antedating of "Implicature"

[Laurence Horn]

Hmmm. At first I thought this must be a consideration or review of the
William James lectures he gave earlier in 1967 at Harvard (I believe spring
semester), while 1968 was the date of Grice's first publication (in
_Foundations of Language_) in which the term is used. But then I realized
that the reference to "_Mind_ 76:12" must be to p. 12 of the 1967 volume
(Vol. 76, or more technically LXXVI) of that journal, which would mean a
paper published in January and hence submitted in 1966, thus antedating the
William James lectures, which strikes me as odd. Then I checked p. 12 (and
indeed the entire paper encompassing that page, an article about Plato's
_Cratylus_ and its debate on the nature of language)--no mention of either
Mr. Grice or implicature.  So a mystery.  If the volume is correctly cited
(and the volume number and year do match up), the reference can't be to p.
12.  I checked other likely suspects in that issue, p. 112, p. 120, etc.,
but didn't find the missing reference. So maybe a later issue in that
volume (and hence a much higher page number)? That would make more sense,
especially one coming in late spring of 1967 or after.

On the other hand, I hereby guarantee there will never be an antedating of
the OED's 1972 entry for "scalar implicature".

LH

On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 7:51 PM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:

> implicature (OED 1968)
>
> 1967 _Mind_ 76:12 (JSTOR)  Mr. Grice's recent work on what he calls
> 'implicature.'
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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