3V0776.02 An inference (3/8/80)

Peggy ran from the dining room to me in the living room. Holding out
her hand to me (I responded to take whatever it might be), Peggy
dropped coins in my hand. She said, ‘Money on table. Somebody left it.’

Not only is this a two-sentence speech act, it also exhibits an inference
(Notice the pause that once would have separated ‘Money…table’ is
gone, moved to the position as a sentence stop. With the intra-phrase
pauses deleted, it is now possible to relate through language, across an
un-namable pause of semantic relation, two clusters of ideas that
earlier would have been too unstructured, too fragmentary, to be
pulled together as a semantic whole.

Confer here Archibald MacLeish’s presentational discussion of Chinese
poetry in his book ‘Poetry and Experience.’

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