Pragmatics, intention, and implication

[17] Im plicature and the Sentence.
Implication can be effected on the level of the sentence by using or not 
using certain paraphrases. Thus, one reason for using the passive is to be 
able to omit the agent or cause, but all the while implying that one was 
there. Even if the agent or cause is omitted, the implication of a passive is 
that one or the other was involved, that the proposition is not about 
something which just happened. This is the difference between “he 
died” and “he was killed.”
Another implication of an agentless sentence is that the agent is not 
important enough to mention, or that such mention is beside the point. 
In this category, there is what I call the “housewifeless” passive, as in
19A. T he beds got made.
19B. T he dinner is cooked.
19C. T he house was cleaned.
These examples of agency or its lack thereof by no means exhaust all 
of the resources of sentence grammars to create implications, but is 
sufficient to the task at hand. Kearns (1984, p. 67) maintains that sen­
tences are fundamental in imparting inferential meaning, as we have just 
seen in the instance of agentless passives [not his example]. T he very use 
of a certain grammatical form creates entailment.
My oft-quoted example (from Cohen 1978) is an interesting example 
of incompatibility between terms and sentences:

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Pragmatics, Intention, and Implication
173
20. Looks like clay. Sounds like gray. Take you for a roll in the hay.
Hay day. May day. Help! I need help.
Clay
is both a tactile and visual stimulus, so the first simile is fine, but 
gray
is a color, not a sound, so that the “Sounds like gray” is incompatible. 
The subsequent sentences in this uttered passage do not add any informa- 
tion which would modify the oxymoronic construction entailed by the 
reference to gray as a sound. Nor do they give any clue as to how 
sounding like gray is relevant to looking like clay. T he individual terms 
in this utterance cannot be forged into a discourse because of the their 
fundamental incompatibility. This is not to say that someone could 
never forge such incompatible terms into a coherent structure by adding 
other terms to it. That is not the issue. T he issue is that the speaker of 20 
above has not done so and has given no clues in the given utterance that 
would allow us to make such additions or to normalize the sequence in 
any way. Consequently, part of the abnormality of this utterance lies in 
its incompatible entailments.