H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: SIDONIO

 G.: Let us begin with the pleasure before the principle. Lewis and Short actually gave inplicatura an entry. S.: Which is the sort of thing one dreams of only after too much Latin and too little sleep. G.: Precisely. Not because I needed their permission, but because it amused me that the form was there, dignified by lexicography, and attached to Sidonius Apollinaris. [en.wikipedia.org] S.: And glossed, if I remember, as “entanglement.” G.: Yes. Which is already half the joke. Had Lewis and Short translated it as implicature, they would have been far too Griceian for their own century. [tertullian.org], [archive.org] S.: Still, the form itself is irresistible. G.: Entirely. I knew perfectly well that the Latin verbal system makes it perfectly productive. You have plicare, to fold. Add in-, and you get inplicare, to fold in, involve, entangle. From there you may have participles, future participles, verbal nouns, and all the rest. But productive things can still be delightful. S.: Then we should do the morphology before the wit overcomes us. G.: A sound principle. Plico, plicare, plicavi or plicui in later habits, plicatum. The root idea is folding. S.: And in-plico or in-plico, more classically inplico, inplicare, inplicavi, inplicitum or implicatum depending on age and orthography. G.: Yes. One must remember the old spelling with n before p. Sidonius gives us inplicatura, not implicatura in the modern tidier habit. [thelatinlibrary.com], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: So the form is built quite regularly. G.: Entirely regularly. From the supine stem or participial base one gets implicatus, a thing folded in, entangled, involved. Then the future active participle, implicaturus, is “about to implicate” or “destined to involve,” if one insists on Englishing it awkwardly. S.: And the feminine implicatura? G.: That is where the amusement begins. As a future active participle feminine, implicatura would mean a feminine subject about to implicate, or one destined to entangle. But lexically, in Sidonius, inplicatura functions as a noun: an entanglement, a foldedness, a complication, a knot of discursiveness. [tertullian.org], [archive.org] S.: So you distinguish the productive grammatical form from the lexicalised noun. G.: Precisely. The Latin system licenses the form, but Sidonius gives it local life. Lewis and Short then preserve that life as lexicographical curiosity rather than philosophical prophecy. S.: Which is fortunate for them. G.: Yes. Otherwise one should have had to accuse them of reading me backward into the fifth century, which is an unkind thing to do even to lexicographers. S.: Then the central distinction: implying and the implicatum. G.: Exactly. This matters far more than the historical joke. There is the act, and there is what is left implicated by it. The implying is what some utterer does. The implicatum is what is produced, or better, what is made available to be gathered. S.: So, in your own preferred terminology, the utterer implicates; the hearer recovers an implicatum. G.: Yes, though I more often say “implicates” of the utterance or the utterer’s move, and “implicatum” of what is implicated. The distinction is useful because one ought not to confuse the process with its product. S.: Like signifying and signification. G.: Very much so. Or meaning and what is meant. The “-ure” in my English coinage was partly meant to mark a product distinct from the act of implying. S.: Just as “implication” was already taken up with logical and semantic uses you found too broad. G.: Exactly. I wanted something near implication, but not identical with it. Implicature looked tidy, Latinate, and perhaps a little absurd in a serviceable way. S.: And Sidonius’s inplicatura confirmed that the absurdity had pedigree. G.: A very peripatetic pedigree, if one believes the context. He is mocking the knotty involutions of philosophers, especially Sidonius Apollinaris’s favourite targets when they become too self-entangling. [en.wikipedia.org], [tertullian.org] S.: Can we recover the actual quotation? G.: Not safely from memory alone, and I prefer not to counterfeit a text. We know from the lexicographical tradition and the Sidonian corpus that inplicatura appears there in the sense of entanglement or involution. [thelatinlibrary.com], [tertullian.org], [archive.org] S.: So we shall be prudent. G.: For once. A philosopher should know when not to become an editor without apparatus. S.: But the point remains: the noun means entanglement, not hidden meaning. G.: Precisely. Sidonius uses it pejoratively or playfully for verbal or conceptual knotting. My use was more exact and less abusive. I wanted the notion of something folded in, not something merely snarled. S.: Then the fold matters more than the knot. G.: Very much. An implicature is not necessarily a muddle. It is something left in the fold of what is said, to be taken out by a competent hearer. S.: So Latin plicare gives you the spatial metaphor. G.: Yes. And that metaphor is much better than people notice. To imply is literally to fold in; to explicate is to unfold. I did not need Heidegger to tell me that. S.: And disimplicatura? G.: A barbarism, but one I can enjoy. If one may have explicatio, one can jest about disimplicatura as the undoing of the fold. Though one must not let the joke do the theory’s work. S.: Let us return to grammar. If inplicare belongs to the first conjugation, then its future infinitive active is implicaturum esse. G.: Yes. And the future participle implicaturus, -a, -um behaves as expected: “about to implicate” in the grammatical sense. Which is why one should not confuse the participial feminine implicatura with a noun unless usage warrants it. S.: Sidonius warrants it. G.: Exactly. Usage rescues morphology from innocence. S.: And the noun’s relation to the participle? G.: One may suspect refunctionalisation. Latin often lets participial forms drift into substantival or quasi-substantival lives, especially in later or less classical usage. I was not shocked by inplicatura, only amused. S.: Because Lewis and Short were willing to register it. G.: Yes. Lexicographers are at their best when they quietly preserve what the schoolmaster would rather omit. S.: Now to the English branch. Usually you say that it is you who implicate. G.: Quite. “I implied that he was a fool.” “He implicated that he had no intention of coming” would be dreadful English, because implicate as a verb in ordinary English has largely gone criminal. S.: “He was implicated in a crime.” G.: Exactly. There implicate means involve, entangle in the evidentiary or causal web of wrongdoing. Different family resemblance, same old folding root. S.: So in English one must keep apart imply, implicate, and be implicated. G.: Yes. The first is the ordinary active verb of indirect suggestion. The second, as an active transitive, is rare and tends to sound legal or archaic. The passive or participial use—“implicated in”—belongs to criminal and forensic prose. S.: And yet historically the family is the same. G.: Entirely. The law kept one branch; ordinary language preferred another. My coinage exploits the family resemblance without obeying the criminal specialisation. S.: There is also employ. G.: Ah yes, another fun little branch. One of those cases where the older Anglo-Norman and French routes keep alive a Latin sense of plicare through application, involvement, and folding into service. That my ancestor Richard d’Gris may have heard something in that region does not make him responsible for my etymologies, but it pleases the imagination. S.: So “employ” is to fold into use. G.: Broadly, yes. To apply, engage, involve a person or thing in a task. It is another descendant of the old family of folds and applications. The point is not exact historical lecturing at dinner, but the persistence of the root metaphor. S.: Folding, involving, applying, entangling. G.: Precisely. And therefore implying, in my adapted philosophical sense, sits very naturally in that company. S.: Which brings us to the main philosophical distinction. The utterer does the implying; the utterance carries or gives rise to an implicatum; the hearer recovers the implicatum by reasoning. G.: Very good. That is the basic triad. And it is helpful because “implicature” in English may name either the item implicated or the general phenomenon, while “implicatum” can be reserved for the item itself. S.: So the singular count noun for the product is implicatum. G.: If one wants tidy scholasticity, yes. I have often been content with implicature for the product, but implicatum can save a sentence from ambiguity. S.: Then what of implying as distinct from implicating? G.: In my own English, I generally prefer “implicate” for the technical verb if I want it to match implicature, but “imply” remains the ordinary language neighbour. “He implied that p” is fine; “he implicated that p” sounds over-tailored. S.: Yet “the utterance implicates that p” may be tolerable in seminar. G.: Tolerable, yes. Seminar-English is allowed a few crimes for the sake of exactness. S.: And Sidonius’s inplicatura would have been translated by Lewis and Short simply as entanglement. G.: Yes, soberly, and thank heaven for that. Had they printed “implicature,” the whole joke would have become indecent. They would have looked like accomplices before the fact. S.: You enjoy this more than the theory perhaps deserves. G.: More than the theory deserves, less than the lexicography does. Still, the lexical history helps one see that my coinage was not a mad graft. It sat well in the older fold-family. S.: Then perhaps we should state the fold-family fully. Plico, plicare. Complico. Explico. Implico. Replico perhaps. G.: Yes. Complicate, explicate, implicate, replicate—all the old pleasures of folding together, folding out, folding in, folding back. English keeps them all, though with various drifts. S.: And conversation itself often moves by such foldings. G.: Exactly. An implicature is what is folded into the saying without being said outright. An explanation unfolds it. A complication may arise when too many folds are left at once. S.: Sidonius’s complaint about philosophers. G.: Precisely. The peripatetics become knot-makers rather than guides to the fold. That is why his inplicatura is comic and faintly censorious. [tertullian.org], [archive.org] S.: Do you think Sidonius would have approved of your use? G.: Probably not. He would have thought I was ennobling what ought to remain a vice. But then he was entitled to his own irony. S.: And Lewis and Short? G.: They would have shrugged and added another semicolon. S.: Let us be concrete. “Jones has beautiful handwriting.” G.: Ah yes. A beautiful old case. The tutor says it at collection. The saying means less and more than it says. Literally praise of penmanship; implicaturally, in the circumstances, a judgment that Jones is otherwise hopeless at philosophy. S.: Then the implying lies in the tutor’s choice to offer only that praise under the institutional assumption that something more relevant would have been said had there been anything to say. G.: Exactly. The implicatum is that Jones’s philosophical performance is poor. S.: And the hearer recovers it by reference to relevance, expectation, and the local habits of academic cruelty. G.: Very good. Sidonius would perhaps call it a civilised inplicatura; I call it Tuesday morning. S.: Another example: “Bring me a paper tomorrow.” “A newspaper?” G.: There you have incorrigibility of meaning. The pupil pretends to take the lexical content while ignoring the obvious institutional intended sense. The tutor’s utterance means an essay; the pupil performs a mock-literal uptake. S.: So the utterer’s implying and the addressee’s refusal to recognise the implicatum come apart. G.: Precisely. Which is why the case is philosophically useful. Meaning does not collapse into dictionary possibility. S.: “Going through the dictionary” remains good advice only if one knows when to stop. G.: Exactly. Austin said go through the dictionary, not worship it. S.: And yet you did go to Lewis and Short. G.: With pleasure. Not for doctrine, but for ancestry. One likes to know whether one’s word would shock a Roman. S.: And it turned out not to. G.: At least not entirely. The Roman would have heard folds and entanglements, perhaps too much of the latter, but not sheer monstrosity. S.: Then tell me about the participles again. Implicatus, implicans, implicaturus. G.: Implicatus is the past participle: implicated, involved, entangled, folded in. Implicans would be the present active participle in post-classical or participial use if one formed it in the obvious way, though Latin style varies in what it tolerates. Implicaturus is the future active participle: one who is about to implicate, or likely to implicate. S.: And implicatura as noun stands beside that as a lexicalised offspring. G.: Yes. Not because the grammar compels the noun, but because usage licenses it. That is the important thing. Latin can generate the form; Sidonius gives us the attested amusement. S.: So when you coined implicature, you were not simply borrowing Latin wholesale. G.: No. I was making an English philosophical convenience with a Latin smile behind it. S.: And choosing “-ure” rather than “-ation” or “-ing.” G.: Quite. Implication was already too crowded. “Implicating” would have sounded criminal. “Implying” was too verb-like. “Implicature” gave me a product-name adjacent to implication but not identical with it. S.: Which is exactly what the theory wanted. G.: Yes. A countable or at least mentionable product of conversational practice, distinct from strict logical implication. S.: Then the difference between implication and implicature is not merely syllabic. G.: Heaven forbid. Logical implication may hold independently of speaker’s intention or cooperative context. Conversational implicature depends upon such things. S.: Yet both preserve some relation to the fold-family. G.: A faint one, yes. But only the conversational case needed the extra lexical elbow-room. S.: And implicatum lets you be still tidier. G.: Indeed. If I say “the utterance has this implicature,” I may mean the general phenomenon or the particular folded content. If I say “the implicatum is that Jones is no good,” I remove the wobble. S.: Though at the cost of sounding more scholastic. G.: One cannot have everything. S.: Does the Latin encourage a distinction between act and product more than English does? G.: The Latin system certainly makes one sensitive to derivational families. Verb, participle, verbal noun, adjectival residue—Latin keeps the workshop visible. English often inherits the furniture after the workshop has shut. S.: Which is perhaps why you liked the discovery. G.: Exactly. It was not that I thought Sidonius had anticipated me. It was that the old workshop door was still ajar. S.: Beautifully put. G.: Keep it and improve it out of all recognition. S.: Another thing. “Implicate” in Anglo-Norman and legal English preserved the involve-entangle branch. Does that not make your technical use slightly perverse? G.: Entirely. But philosophical coinages should be slightly perverse. Otherwise they do not disturb the complacencies of ordinary usage enough to be noticed. S.: Yet not so perverse as to become private language. G.: Precisely. One wants disciplined eccentricity. S.: Like Oxford. G.: On its better days. S.: Would you ever have used “inplicatura” in print? G.: Only to tease a classically over-armed audience. English must bear its own burdens. I was not trying to make philosophy more Latinate than necessary. S.: A generous restraint. G.: Or mere tactical prudence. Too much Latin and people think one is hiding weak arguments behind dead inflections. S.: Whereas you were hiding living ones behind folds. G.: Exactly. The distinction matters. S.: Then perhaps the final summary should run as follows. Sidonius uses inplicatura to mean entanglement or involution in discourse; Lewis and Short soberly record that; you notice with pleasure that the Latin root-family of plicare and implicare makes your own coinage less monstrous than it might appear; but your implicature is not Sidonius’s entanglement, rather a technical name for what is folded into an utterance beyond what is said. G.: Splendid. Add that the utterer does the implying or implicating, the hearer recovers the implicatum, and that the whole business belongs to the old family of folds, involvements, and unfoldings. S.: And that Lewis and Short would have been too Griceian had they dared to print “implicature.” G.: Yes, do keep that. It is exactly the right amount of affectionate perversity. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Sidonian, with one Lewis and Short left open on the table.