Semantics The Great Chain of Being, The Nature of Things, Conver

Explain in detail how “The Great Chain of Being”, “The Nature of Things”, “Conversational Implicatures”, and “Generic is Specific” interrelate with each other in analysis and synthesis of poetry.

In Dr. Seuss’s poem, “What was I scared of”, the Speaker meets a pair of pale green pants, “with nobody inside them” <http://bellsouthpwp.net/y/v/yvonne38/Dottie's.html>.

Throughout the poem, he encounters the pants and either stands and thinks for minute upon his predicament, or runs away in fear.  At the end of the poem, the pants “cry” and he comforts them.  The Speaker and the pants become friends and when they meet each other, “We never shake or tremble // We both smile and we say, “Hi!” ” 
 
While analyzing the text, one notes that “generic is specific” improves the understanding that the pants are a ghost as soon as the word, “spooky”, appears.  The reader is unfamiliar with this “half-ghost” yet, the knowledge schema of a typical ghost mapped  onto this unknown example of a ghost enhances understanding.  In the beginning of the poem the pants are a “what”, i.e. – a thing.  They are at the lowest end of the “Great Chain of Being”.  As the poem progresses, the pants take on more and more anthropomorphic qualities from the “Nature of Things”.  They are riding a bicycle, running towards the speaker, and rowing a boat.  In the final scene, the speaker says “I felt my hand touch someone” and “we were standing face to face” referring to the ghostly pants. Then the pants “began to cry…tremble…pants were just as scared as I…pants were whimpering”.   The speaker finds out that the pants were as much afraid of him, as he was of them.  In the end of the poem, the pants moved up the Great Chain of Being to a near human existence and when the Speaker and the pants meet from that point on, they say “Hi”.

By violating Grice’s conversational implicatures, Dr. Seuss is able to “go on and on” with the poem.  The speaker is not perspicuous, in fact he is ambiguous, “but I have never been afraid of anything. Not very.” Yet, it is this ambiguity and the sense that he is dragging his feet with the decision to overcome his fear of the ghostly pants is what makes the child reader empathize with the poem’s speaker.  If he showed the pants a negative face, and said, “be gone evil spirit”, he would have “avoided obscurity of expression” and stopped encouraging the pants from reappearing, but this would be predictable and spoil the surprise ending.  Only when the speaker actually follows Grice’s cooperative principle of forming a relationship between the ghostly pants and himself and makes a true contribution, i.e., calms the pants down, hugs them, sits down for a conversation with them does the story proceed to the happy denouement.  The above analysis showed how “The Great Chain of Being”, the “Nature of Things” as well as “Generic is Specific” contributed to the transformation of the fear of the pants to acceptance of them by the speaker.  By violating Grice’s conversational implicatures and then adhering to them, Dr. Seuss creates a surprising “happy end” in this poem.