logicandlanguage.net

The amnesty case strikes me as a plausible case of what Bach calls standardized nonliterality - where the standard usual use of a sentence departs from its literal meaning. I'm not sure whether the same applies to the answering machine case, but I can't quite articulate why at the moment. It's a great example though.

Nice data, Gillian. BTW, what do think of this?

"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last."

Hmm... seems to me that it might suggest that semantics aren't quite as standard as one might expect. Just as Sally Haslanger pointed out with bachelors being unmarried males (or not necessarily).

This is a great example. It seems to me that it resembles the use of "you" as a variable, which can also be done with "I." ("If I'm a Cowboys fan, I'm not too happy with the Bledsoe signing.") Does "Who is the victim of abuse? She is your wife, sister, mother, daughter, niece and neighbor" also strike you as analytically false? In the third person it seems easier to get to the conveyed meaning--that all those people are victims of abuse (also, one hopes, literally false)--but I'm not sure exactly how it works.

This makes me think about the answering-machine example, and it does make me doubt the theories on which "I am here now" is analytic. Why shouldn't we say that in utterances that consist of playbacks of recorded messages, the agent-of-context is the person who recorded the message, and the time-of-context and place-of-context are the time and place of the playback? That seems natural enough to me that I don't see the need to resort to any non-literality to explain the answering machine statement.

(Thinking about it more, I need to backtrack. At the end of The Secret History--this isn't a spoiler!--the narrator sees an ad in which someone says, "by the time you see this, I'll be dead" [of lung cancer]. On my theory it should be "I'm dead now." But that makes no sense. OTOH, if I were recording a message to be played back in the museum that my grateful admirers will one day make out of my home, I'd say, "Here is the study in which I wrote all my great masterpieces"--even, possibly, if some of my great masterpieces were yet to be written in that study! Hmmm.)

Well, although you ight say that the overt syntax of the answering machine example and that of the amnesty message is the same, what they have in common is the semantic displacement property. But the amnesty message is a simple instance of role-playing: there is a fictional character in a portrayed situation, which is supposed to represent a real life problem. When the messages says I am your wife, daughter... it is the identification of the character by the introduction of a variable, such as the variable can be replaced by any member of the set {wife, daughter, mother...}.