Zoo story
Task E – Our answer
What we know about deductive logic means that once we know Peter is
male and married (which he has confirmed in turn 4) it follows with absolute
certainty that he has a wife. Jerry’s utterance in turn 7 thus seems
absurd because it spells out unnecessarily something that must be logically
true. This absurd conversational behaviour is clearly unsettling. It is
unclear whether Grice’s maxim of quantity is being flouted or violated,
and so it is difficult to work out exactly what Jerry’s intentions
are in saying what he says.
In turn 9 Jerry also makes a point of spelling out something everyone
already knows. Peter has referred to his children in turn 2, and so when
Jerry says ‘And you have children.’ he is breaking Grice’s
maxim of quantity. As with turn 7, the effect is unsettling because it
is difficult to know whether to construe Jerry’s contribution as
a violation or a flout of the Gricean maxim. Does Jerry lack short-term
memory and so have some sort of Alzheimer’s-like processing problem,
or is he trying to implicate something we (and Peter) can’t work
out? This inability to work out the intended significance of utterances
is typical of some absurdist drama.
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