Why Quotation Is Not a Semantic Phenomenon, and

Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning 11

Ilse Depraetere Raphael Salkie Editors

Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line

Chapter 14

Why Quotation Is Not a Semantic Phenomenon, and Why It Calls for a Pragmatic Theory Philippe De Brabanter Abstract In this paper, I argue that quotation is not primarily a linguistic phenomenon. Linguistic productions are essentially symbolic, conventional, whereas quotations, in essence, are acts of iconic communication, i.e. ‘demonstrations’. As a consequence, any purely semantic account of the meaning of quotations—quotation are names, descriptions, demonstratives—is bound to be not only incomplete but flawed in key respects. Since most existing accounts of quotation are fundamentally semantic, they are also necessarily deficient, and therefore unsuitable as general, comprehensive theories of quotation. The ‘Depiction’ theory I defend is a pragmatic one at heart. That does not prevent it from also accounting for the truth-conditional effects of quotation pointed out in the literature (via such mechanisms as ‘syntactic recruitment’, ‘free pragmatic enrichment’, and ‘context-shifts’) and for certain morphosyntactic peculiarities of quoting expressions. The Depiction theory offers the best prospects for a theory that can (i) describe the empirical facts about quotation, (ii) help fix the boundaries of the phenomenon ‘quotation’, while (iii) doing justice to its iconic essence. Keywords Iconic communication • Depiction • Mixed modes of communication • Hybrid ‘quotation’ • Syntactic recruitment In this paper, I argue that quotation is not primarily a linguistic phenomenon. Linguistic productions are essentially symbolic (in Peirce’s sense), whereas quotations, in essence, are iconic. They are therefore best treated as ‘demonstrations’ (Clark and Gerrig 1990; Clark 1996; Recanati 2001). As a consequence, any purely semantic account of the meaning of quotations is bound to be not only incomplete but flawed in key respects. Any sound theory of quotation must be a pragmatic one at heart, with semantics playing only an ancillary role. Since most existing accounts of quotation are fundamentally semantic, they are also necessarily deficient, and therefore unsuitable as general, comprehensive theories of quotation.

P. De Brabanter (!) Département de Langues et Littératures Modernes, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 I. Depraetere, R. Salkie (eds.), Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line, Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning 11, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32247-6_14

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14.1 Introduction In the course of the twentieth century, four families of theories vied for the title of most satisfactory account of quotation. Usually identified as the ‘Name’, ‘Description’, ‘Demonstrative’ and ‘Identity’ theories, they were mainly devised by philosophers of language, especially of the analytic persuasion. All four theories regard quotation as a linguistic phenomenon. The first three make the further assumption that quotation is to be explained along semantic lines; the fourth adopts the dissenting view that quoting is a matter of pragmatics. A fifth type of theory emerged towards the end of the century, which does not assume quotation to be essentially linguistic. It is a version of that theory that I defend in the present paper, under the name ‘Depiction Theory’.1 The next section offers a brief outline of the four traditional contenders. Section 14.3 sketches the Depiction T, whose ability to account for the central ‘varieties of quotation’ mentioned in the literature is tested in Sect. 14.4. Section 14.5 considers the limits of the phenomenon ‘quotation’, and Sect. 14.6 the conditions for a descriptively and explanatorily adequate theory. In that section, I also indicate which extra components (semantic, truth-conditional, morphosyntactic) the Depiction T must include to pass muster. Section 14.7 is devoted to a type of quotation which most other theories fail to explain but which the Depiction T satisfactorily accounts for. Section 14.8 offers some brief conclusions.

14.2 Brief Sketches of the Main Competing Theories Initially, philosophers were concerned exclusively with cases of ‘pure quotation’ (or ‘metalinguistic citation’), as in (1) and (2). Their interest stemmed (i) from what they saw as the need for an exact and unambiguous idiom for science, which would enable one to avoid reproducing in logical and mathematical writings the defects of natural languages; and (ii) from the realisation that quotation contexts are ‘opaque’, i.e. block truth-preserving substitution of co-referential terms, as illustrated by (1) and (2). Substitute Tully for Cicero, and the truth-value changes, in spite of the truth of (3): (1) (2) (3)

‘Cicero’ contains six letters. ‘Tully’ contains six letters. Cicero D Tully

Early theorists (Tarski 1983 (1931); Carnap 1934; Quine 1940) treated quotations as either names or definite descriptions. Since Tarski and Quine regarded these two proposals as extensionally equivalent, I will not say any more about the Description T. The Name Theory is known primarily through Quine’s Mathematical Logic 1

Whenever suitable, I will write T for Theory.

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(1940), which introduced a pair of terms that ‘made it big’ in philosophy of language and linguistics, ‘use’ and ‘mention’. Here is Quine’s definition of a quotation: The name of a name or other expression is commonly formed by putting the named expression in quotation marks; the whole, called a quotation, denotes its interior. (1940: 23)

How do use and mention work? In examples like (1) and (2), a quotation—the complex formed by the quotation marks and the interior—is used, and a personal name is mentioned. In other words, there is both use and mention, but not of the same expression. Another central tenet of the Name T is that quotations are unstructured signs (Tarski 1983: 159f; Quine 1940: 26), i.e. single morphemes (Rey-Debove 1978: 149). Hence, the reason why Tully cannot be substituted for Cicero in (1) is that Cicero simply does not occur in ‘Cicero’, not any more than cat in cattle—counterintuitive though it may seem. In other words, there is no extensional equivalent of Tully in the unstructured ‘Cicero’. The later ‘Demonstrative Theory’, popularised by Donald Davidson—the Danish linguist H.S. Sørensen (1958, 1961) remains a largely uncredited precursor—has it that “it is the quotation marks that do all the referring” (Davidson 1979: 37). They are like a demonstrative pronoun that points to the expression inside the quotation marks and thus succeeds in indirectly designating a type of which this expression is a token. Davidson suggests glossing the quotation marks as meaning “the expression a token of which is here” (ibid.: 37–38). Example (1) can therefore be represented as follows: (1DEM )

The expression of which a token is here contains six letters. Cicero

Left of the full stop is a formulation of the semantics of (1). On the right is a word-token that is to be understood as being merely part of the context. It is not semantically or syntactically part of the sentence in (1). Instead, it is something that can be pointed to by means of the demonstrative here. The first three theories briefly sketched above treat quotations along the lines of known linguistic entities: names, definite NPs, demonstratives. They conceive of quotations as linguistic expressions endowed with a semantics. These expressions are to be clearly distinguished from their referents. Thus, on the Name T, the quotation ‘after’ is the name of the preposition after. Likewise with the Description and Demonstrative theories. Parallel to these semantic theories, there existed a more pragmatic theory, which regarded quotation as a different use of words, not as a specific type of linguistic expression endowed with its own semantics. It was dubbed the ‘Identity Theory’, because it equates quoted with quoting expression, thus clashing with Quine’s prescription that no expression can ever be used and mentioned simultaneously. It has been championed by a good many contemporary scholars (Christensen 1967; Searle 1969; Recanati 1979; Washington 1992), and can be traced back through Frege to some medieval philosophers (cf. Rey-Debove 1978: 146; Rosier-Catach 2003).

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The first three theories further differ from the fourth in the significance they ascribe to quotation marks. On the Name and Description theories, there simply is no quotation if no marks are fused to the ‘interior’. On the Demonstrative T, it is the marks alone that do the quoting. The central role accorded quotation marks in these three theories may reflect a problematic bias towards written language. It is not obvious that spoken quotations are consistently framed by a prosodic counterpart of those marks (See e.g. Klewitz and Couper-Kuhlen 1999: 473). By contrast, the Identity T (on at least some of its versions) ascribes no crucial role to quotation marks, thus making it better able to provide a unified account of both written and spoken instances of quotation.

14.2.1 Rough Assessment of the Main Competing Theories All four theories outlined so far appear quite well-equipped to account for most cases of pure quotation (though look below for complications with the Identity T). They also seem capable of describing direct discourse (henceforth DD), at least those prototypical occurrences of DD that function syntactically as arguments of a predicate. However, as soon as one looks beyond pure quotations and DD, the first three theories fail to describe the empirical data adequately. This should not be a surprise in the case of the Name and Description accounts. As some authors have noted (e.g. Bennett 1988: 401), they were primarily intended to provide means of keeping quoting expressions and quoted expressions clearly distinct, thus preventing unwanted confusions. It is therefore debatable whether they should be considered empirical accounts of the actual workings of quotation. As regards the Demonstrative T, it cannot, in its bare form, deal with hybrid cases like (4), not any more than the Name and Description theories.2,3 One can show the inadequacy of the three theories by means of a substitution test: replacement of the quoted string by a name, a definite description or a demonstrative, i.e. NPs, results in the ungrammatical strings under (40 ): (4) (40 )

Gerald said he would “consider running for the Presidency” a. *Gerald said he would George. b. *Gerald said he would the word. c. *Gerald said he would the expression of which a token is here. (These examples are based on Searle 1983: 185.)

The Identity T has no particular difficulties with hybrid cases. Since quotation is merely a different use of an expression, nothing prevents an expression from being used and mentioned at the same time. The Identity T’s commendable simplicity—it posits no creation of names, no concealed descriptions, no discontinuous demonstra2

I use the term ‘hybrid’ in a sense that is both broader and narrower than Clark and Gerrig (1990). For some discussion, see Sect. 14.5.2. 3 See Sect. 14.4.2 for versions of the Demonstrative T developed in order to deal with occurrences going beyond pure quotations.

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tive morphemes—makes it more flexible than the other three theories, and therefore a better candidate as a unitary theory of quotation and quotational phenomena. Furthermore, it is a pragmatic theory that does not set too much store by quotation marks. So what can be wrong with it? Its main problem, I argue, is the identity hypothesis at its core, for both descriptive and explanatory reasons. I start with empirical adequacy. If the notion of identity between quoting and quoted expression is taken at all seriously, then the theory is unable to deal with examples like (5) where non-words, and subsequently a non-English string of English words, are quoted, and (6), which contains what Clark and Gerrig (1990: 781) call a ‘nonlinguistic’ quotation (more about those in Sect. 14.5.1). The reason is simple: none of the quoting ‘entities’ is an expression of English. So quotation can simply not be a different use of an expression, when there is no ordinary use to begin with: (5)

(6)

[S]ome combinations do not occur in utterances: tpiks and musp are not English words, nor is slept the a the an English sentence. (Harris, Z. 1991. A Theory of Language and Information. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 31) M pushes the penis on a gilt cherub which is flying up the mirror frame, and the whole edifice slides back with a great “gzzhhd”. (New Statesman, 20/12/1999)

The Identity T is also inadequate from an explanatory point of view. No simple notion of identity will do. In the most basic instances of pure quotation like (1) and (2), identity holds between a displayed token and a targeted type. In basic DD, it is identity between two tokens of the same type that must be intended. Moreover, that identity is only partial. Consider (7). No verbatim quotation can be expected, since Descartes was writing in Latin: (7)

Why René Descartes said ‘I think, therefore I am’. (Internet)

It would be easy to multiply the issues with identity. In the end, one has to fall back on a weaker notion of resemblance.4 Which sort of resemblance will be theorised in the next section. So, the Identity theory can be salvaged, provided that ‘identity’ is weakened to ‘resemblance’, in other words, provided the Identity T is turned into a ‘Depiction Theory’. At this stage, however, it might seem that we are in trouble. On the one hand, if I am to be trusted, none of the theories reviewed so far passes muster. On the other hand, it seems as if all of the logical possibilities for a theory that regards quotation as a linguistic phenomenon have been exhausted (cf. Washington 1992: 582, 586). Consider ‘Cicero’ in (1) again. What is the quoting expression in this example? – The Name T says it is the complex ‘Cicero’ as a whole. – The Demonstrative T says it is the quotation marks. – The Identity T says it is the interior of the quotation marks.

4 Interestingly, Christensen, an Identity theorist, rejected any ‘picture’ theory of quotation, on the grounds that a picture “is always different from what it pictures” (1967: 362). To his credit, Christensen took identity seriously. But that led him to make the wrong choice.

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What other possibility is left? None. None, that is, unless one gives up the one assumption shared by all these theories, namely that a quotation is essentially a linguistic object. This is the solution that is explored in the next section.

14.3 Quotation Is Not Inherently a Linguistic Phenomenon It may seem extremely counter-intuitive to deny the intrinsic linguistic character of quotation. After all, it is usually words that are quoted; and it is linguists and philosophers of language who investigate quotation. That has to be conceded, naturally: there is ‘something linguistic’ about the central manifestations of quotation. Still, I will claim, that dimension is to be granted no more than a peripheral status. So, if not primarily a linguistic phenomenon, what could quotation be? The key insight is to be found in Clark & Gerrig’s seminal 1990 paper: quotations are ‘demonstrations’, i.e. iconic communicative acts. This provides ample motivation for a label such as the ‘Demonstration Theory’ of quotation. Still, it is easy to confuse the indexical Demonstrative T with the iconic Demonstration T (cf. Recanati 2001: 640 fn2; Gómez-Torrente 2005: 148), hence my preference for the label ‘Depiction Theory’, based on the fact that depictions make up the core of demonstrations (see below). Clark (1996: chapter 8) differentiates between three modes of communication: demonstrating, describing-as, and indicating. Roughly speaking, each mode relies on the use of one of the three different types of signs distinguished by C. S. Peirce (according to one of the trichotomies he made): icon (for demonstrations), symbol (for descriptions/describing-as), index (for indications). This trichotomy is based on the relation between the sign and the ‘object’ it denotes. Icons resemble their objects by exhibiting one or more property that the object possesses; indices have an existential or physical connection to their objects; symbols are linked to them via a rule, or convention (see Atkin 2010). Language use as commonly understood is a matter of conventional signs and falls squarely under description. Language scholars widely grant some role to indications: they are often needed to support the use of certain categories of words, notably demonstratives. Iconic signs, by contrast, are usually accorded only a peripheral role, with onomatopoeic words—which are composite symbolic-iconic signs—receiving some attention. As for iconic acts, they were not normally thought to be relevant to the study of language. A few people, with Clark as their spearhead, disagreed.5 It is one of the goals of the present paper to establish the importance of demonstrations for the study of language use. The two central properties of demonstrations is that they are nonserious and selective. To illustrate this, and to introduce some useful terminology, I first discuss a non-quotational example. Imagine I use a tennis racket to show my addressee

5

In the meantime, the situation has changed somewhat, with the advent of ‘gesture studies’.

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how Jimi Hendrix plays the Voodoo Child solo in Woodstock. In so doing, I produce a token of a certain type of action of which I am the agent: ME PLAYING (IMAGINARY) GUITAR. This is a nonserious action, because I am not Hendrix actually playing the guitar (in this case I am not even playing at all). Furthermore, by displaying the token of ME PLAYING (IMAGINARY) GUITAR, I make available to my audience—I ‘demonstrate’—a whole bunch of properties. Clark and Gerrig (1990: 768f), speaking of ‘aspects’, distinguish four kinds: – Depictive: those are the aspects that the ‘utterer’6 intends her addressee to recognise as being properties of the target, e.g. speed and suppleness with which the fingers work up and down the (imaginary) fretboard, Hendrix’s closed eyes, etc. – Supportive: those are non-depictive aspects nevertheless necessary to the performance of the demonstration, e.g. my holding a tennis racket as though it were a guitar, or my playing like a right-hander (Hendrix was left-handed). There could be no demonstration if (i) I did not pretend to be holding a guitar and (ii) did not use either of my hands to mimic Hendrix’s playing. Had I used my left hand, that aspect would probably have been judged depictive. – Annotative: these are comments on the target of the demonstration, be they verbal or not, e.g. my saying ‘he doesn’t even seem to be aware of the crowd’ while mimicking Hendrix, or my making a face expressing admiration and bafflement. – Incidental: these are the residual aspects, e.g. my regularly biting my lip, or staggering a bit because I am slightly drunk. So, only some of the properties made salient by the demonstration are intended by the utterer to be recognised as depictive by the addressee. Besides, the depictive properties, together, usually make up less than the intended target—Hendrix’s soloing in Woodstock—which includes Jimi Hendrix, a right-handed guitar, a howling guitar sound, a red bandana, blue flared trousers, etc. Clark & Gerrig’s idea is straightforward: quotations are nonserious and selective in the same way non-verbal demonstrations are. Only some of the properties exhibited by the token produced are depictive, and the depictive properties are usually a partial representation of the target. Which properties are depictive depends on contextual factors, notably the utterer’s intentions and the current state of the interaction with the addressee. Applying this proposal to DD is simple: (8)

And then Greta Garbo said, ‘I want to be alone!’. (cf. Clark 1996: 175; Recanati 2001: 642)

In producing the utterance-token in (8) the utterer seeks to enable her addressee to experience what it is like to hear and see Garbo utter a certain sentence (Clark and Gerrig 1990: 765). This utterance-token brings a whole spate of properties to

6

I use utterance for any communicative act. The producer of an utterance is an utterer, whether or not words are said.

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the addressee’s attention. But the latter is intended to identify only some of these as properties of the target of the demonstration. In the case of (spoken) quotation, those depictive properties fall into three main categories (Clark and Gerrig 1990: 775–780): – Delivery: the utterer made a selection among Garbo’s (character’s) weary voice, intonation, painful facial expression, closed eyes, head leaning back, etc. – Language: the utterer selected English, and she may have reproduced a slight Swedish accent, – Linguistic acts: the utterer chose to depict Garbo’s illocutionary act (a plea to be left alone), its propositional content and its wording—this is a verbatim quote. This quoting of Garbo is nonserious inasmuch as the utterer is not requesting to be left alone. Besides, the demonstration is selective in the sense that the utterer chooses to depict only some aspects of the original utterance. This shows that quotations exhibit the central properties of demonstrations.7 Does the distinction between the four kinds of ‘aspects’ also apply here? First, only some of the demonstrated properties will be depictive (and the depictive aspects together will be a subset of the target’s properties). Second, if (8) is uttered by an adult male, his pitch is likely to be lower than Garbo’s. Yet, any spoken utterance inevitably has a pitch contour—pitch is necessary to any spoken utterance, hence to any quotation as well. This makes the male pitch a supportive aspect of the quotation. Third, the utterer might exaggerate the weariness in Garbo’s voice, to signal, say, that she thinks that Garbo overdoes things here. That would be an annotative aspect. Finally, all sorts of other aspects, e.g. the fact that the utterer is sitting rather than standing like Garbo, can be regarded as incidental.8

14.4 The Depiction Theory and Various Quotational Phenomena Now that I have shown that the Depiction T successfully accounts for DD, I look into other so-called ‘varieties’ of quotation and assess whether the Depiction T does them justice too. I start with pure quotations because they constitute a major obstacle to the acceptance of the theory: intuitively, it seems ill-equipped to deal with quotations that involve no mimicry whatsoever—precisely those quotations

7 For a more complete picture of a demonstration, using Recanati’s terminology (which improves on Clark & Gerrig’s in terms of accuracy), see De Brabanter (2013a: 111–115). 8 In truth, the line is not easy to draw between supportive and incidental aspects. But that is true both for non-verbal demonstrations and for quotations. Hence, it does not undermine the claim that quotations are demonstrations.

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that semantic theories are good at explaining. I then turn to hybrid quotations, which have played a central role in the theoretical controversies over the past two decades, and then to indirect discourse (ID). This discussion will prompt a reevaluation of the very notion of ‘varieties’ of quotation.

14.4.1 Pure Quotations Pure quotations presuppose no source utterer whose words or thoughts the quotation would attempt to reproduce. Instead of being concerned with mimicry (e.g. delivery, linguistic acts), they tend to target stable linguistic or logical properties of lexemes. Some scholars (e.g. Wilson 1999: 141) have denied the ability of a Depiction-type theory to deal with these adequately: (1) (9)

‘Cicero’ contains six letters. [repeated] ‘Although’ is a preposition, if you agree with Huddleston & Pullum.

A first point that needs to be kept in mind is that (1) and (9) could be written or spoken utterances. In the latter case, it is not inconceivable for the quotation to include a mimetic component. I might produce (1) to make a statement about the orthographic form of Cicero and, at the same time, mock, say, my addressee’s pronunciation of it as ["saIs@ô@U]. However, especially with written quotations, it is easy to imagine utterances of (1) and (9) that are not mimetic in any way (that do not seek at all to reproduce aspects of delivery). These Recanati (2001) calls cases of ‘flat mention’. Does the Depiction T have anything to say about them? Remember that a demonstration is selective. An utterer will attempt to reproduce only some of the properties of the intended target. One corollary is that none of the properties of a demonstration are ever obligatorily depictive. In particular, mimicry, though prominent in prototypical instances, is not constitutive of demonstrations. In cases of flat mention, the only depictive properties are linguistic properties possessed by the expression that is quoted. But does that allow us to make sense of demonstrations as nonserious and selective? I believe it does. First, the quotation ‘Cicero’ is nonserious because it is not used in its normal capacity as a referential term designating a person. Second, even with flat mention, a selection can be made between inherent properties of the quoted expression. Consider examples (10) and (11): (10) (11)

Pouvoir is both a noun and a verb. Pouvoir translates as can in English.

These are perfectly acceptable (English) sentences, and they make true statements. Now, combine them to form (12). What you end up with is a sentence with dubious semantic status. Either it is false, or it involves a category mistake, experienced as a sort of zeugma effect, which makes it difficult to ascribe a truth-value to it. The same happens if you combine (13) and (14) to form (15):

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P. De Brabanter ?? Pouvoir is both a noun and a verb and translates as can in English. Pouvoir has the finite forms peux, peut, pouvons, etc. Pouvoir contrasts with the finite forms peux, peut, pouvons, etc. ?? Pouvoir has the finite forms peux, peut, pouvons, and contrasts with the finite forms peux, peut, pouvons.

What these examples show is that even cases of flat mention are selective depictions. In (10), grammatical category is depictive; in (11) it is not. In (13) the property of being a lexeme is depictive; in (14) it is the property of being a form of a lexeme that is. I take the above discussion to have shown that the Depiction T can handle pure quotation, even as flat mention. I now move on to a quotational phenomenon which it seems much better-equipped to deal with.

14.4.2 Hybrid Quotations Until recently, leading accounts of hybrid quotations have been along the lines of the Demonstrative T (Cappelen and Lepore 1997, 2005; Benbaji 2005; GarcíaCarpintero 2005). There has also been a presuppositional account proposed by Geurts and Maier (2005). I start with these previous attempts and argue that they run into serious difficulties. Then I show how the Depiction T deals with hybrids. Cappelen and Lepore (1997) singled out a particular hybrid as more worthy of attention than others, because it was amenable to a semantic account. They dubbed it ‘mixed quotation’ (MQ), and many writers on quotation have adopted the label and the category (though not always the assumptions behind). Consider (4) again: (4)

Gerald said he would “consider running for the Presidency”. [repeated]

Cappelen & Lepore believe that (4) can be dealt with semantically if one takes seriously the observation that it mixes ID with DD. Deriving inspiration from Davidson, they take ID to involve a relation of ‘samesaying’ (SS), and DD one of ‘sametokening’ (ST). This yields the following truth-conditions for (4): (4TC )

9u(Said(Gerald, u) & SS(u, that) & ST(u, these)). he would consider running for the Presidency.

(4TC ) states that there is an utterance u such that Gerald said u and u samesays He would consider running for the Presidency and u sametokens consider running for the Presidency. Samesaying is roughly equivalent to ‘expresses the same content as’ while sametokening is roughly equivalent to ‘is a token of the same type as’. Note that it is because say introduces both indirect and direct speech that it can be glossed as the pair of predicates SS and ST. For (4) to be true, Gerald must have produced the very words consider running for the Presidency. Many take this—which I will call ‘speech attribution’—to be a robust intuition (cf. Reimer 2005: 167f). The version of the Depiction T that

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I defend argues that speech attribution is context-sensitive, and therefore not an aspect of the semantics of MQ. Following Recanati (2001), I treat it as a possible free pragmatic enrichment of the truth-conditions of (4). Free pragmatic enrichment is a pragmatic process because it applies top-down: it is not triggered by some linguistic element in the clause. This makes it different from the assignment of referents to indexicals, which is required by the very meaning of those expressions. In the case at hand, enrichment is not triggered by the quotation marks, which are mere optional ‘indicators’ endowed with an underdetermined meaning. All that they commit their user to is that the enclosed words be displayed for some depictive purpose (Recanati 2001: 663). This endorsement of context-sensitivity allows the Depiction T to handle examples like (16), in which the quoted words are attributed to Rupert, or Rupert and Alice: (16)

Alice said that life is ‘difficult to understand’, to use Rupert’s favourite phrase.

Note that the occurrence of the metalinguistic comment is not a necessary condition for such an open-ended interpretation. It suffices that the context, e.g. the previous co-text, makes sufficiently salient another speaker to whom the quoted words can be attributed. A second, more damning, issue for hardcore semantic approaches is the question how many categories of hybrids there are? Most writers recognise two: MQ and scare quoting (ScQ), as in (17): (17)

Financing for the new force will be paid for out of the existing Ministry of ‘Defence’ budget.

Scare quoting typically has a distancing effect—the utterer of (17) might be hinting that she does not think Defence is an apt term—, and the quoted words are not usually ascribed to any speaker in particular. This has prompted Cappelen & Lepore to regard ScQ as a pragmatic phenomenon with no impact on truth-conditions. Others have disagreed and have chosen to interpret the meaning of scare quotes (Benbaji 2005) or of all hybrids (Geurts and Maier 2005) as follows: if ‘˛’ is a scare quote (or more broadly a hybrid), its meaning is “what (contextually salient) speaker x calls ˛”.9 In the next few paragraphs I will (i) argue against the partition of hybrids between MQ and ScQ; (ii) highlight a problem for those who do not endorse this partition but adopt a semantics of hybrids like the one mentioned at the end of the previous paragraph.

9 In spite of their similarities, there are significant differences between the theories of Geurts & Maier and Benbaji. Another important account is Predelli’s (2005). See De Brabanter (2010a) for discussion.

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14.4.2.1

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The Partition of Hybrids into MQ and ScQ

There are two problems here: first, if one accepts a strict separation between MQ and ScQ, then many hybrid quotations remain unaccounted for. Second, it turns out that there is no principled way of drawing the line between MQ and ScQ. The conclusion is that it is sounder to accept that there is one large category of hybrid cases, with several features capable of varying between them. Consider (18): (18)

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” (www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html).

The strings in bold in (18) seem to fall somewhere between MQ and ScQ. None of the quotations is under the scope of a reporting verb. We are therefore not dealing with a combination of ID and DD, hence (18) cannot instantiate MQ. Yet, at the same time, it is clear that the quoted words are all ascribed to the same source, namely Sarah Palin. In addition, it may be that the quotations have a truthconditional import—in other words, that the statements in (18) would be judged to be false if Palin had not actually uttered those words. It is true that intuitions about truth and falsity are not neat here—they seldom are when hybrids are not framed by a reporting verb. Space limitations prevent me from going through a wide range of examples here, but there is a type of hybrids that have been studied in detail by Recanati (2000, 2001) which unquestionably affect truth-conditions while unquestionably not being instances of MQ. Recanati terms them ‘non-cumulative’ hybrids, because their disquoted counterpart—the same sentence without its quotational dimension—is not truth-conditionally entailed by the sentence containing the hybrid. They stand in contrast to cumulative hybrids like (4), (16) or (17). The most convincing account of non-cumulative hybrids I am aware of is Recanati’s (2001: 674–680), which relies on a variety of ‘context-shifts’: any one of the three core parameters of a context—the language, the situation of utterance, the circumstance of evaluation—can be shifted (2000; 2001: 678ff). Consider the occurrence of an indexical and the present tense in the quotation in (19), from a book review: (19)

Naturally, he [John Lennon] was expelled and sent to art school, ‘so I can fail there as well’. (Guardian Weekly, 2–8/11/2000)

In order for the pronoun I and the present tense to be interpreted correctly, the situation of utterance that assigns reference must be shifted to that in which Lennon spoke. Recanati maintains that, in spite of its impact on truth-conditions, that shift is a pragmatic mechanism, because it is not triggered by the quotation marks. Instead, the shift, like ambiguity resolution and the determination of a language in which to interpret the utterance, takes place ‘pre-semantically’, i.e. at the level at which the

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sentence that is to undergo semantic interpretation is determined. (For details about the background assumptions of the theory of shifts, see De Brabanter 2005a: 37f, 2013a: 121ff, 2013b: 136 f. For an example involving a distinct context-shift, see Sect. 14.6.2.2.) Discussing a similar case—though one where the quotation falls under the scope of a reporting verb—Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 63f) recognise that the fact that the indexical it contains cannot be interpreted with respect to the reporting situation affects truth-conditions. However, they fail to realise that this must make (19) a case of MQ not ScQ, since ScQ is said to be truth-conditionally neutral. Yet, it is unjustified to analyse (19) along the lines of (4TC ): since there is no reporting verb in (19), nothing licenses the Samesays predicate. So, (19) instantiates neither MQ nor ScQ. One might argue that it exemplifies a third kind of hybrid. But the risk is that kinds of hybrids will multiply, the greater the range of examples examined. Benbaji’s or Geurts and Maier’s semantic proposals can deal with (19) just as satisfactorily as the Depiction T. But there are cases that clearly adjudicate between these proposals: sentences where hybrids do not map onto syntactic constituents. It is to those that I now turn. 14.4.2.2

Non-constituents in Hybrid Quotations

Approaches like Geurts & Maier’s or Benbaji’s require hybrids to match syntactic constituents: the ˛ in the formula ‘what (contextually salient) speaker x calls ˛’ must be a syntactic constituent, because only constituents can be paired with a meaning. However, as Abbott (2005: 20) and Cumming (2005: 80f) have shown, it is sometimes non-constituents that are quoted: (20) (21)

David said that he had donated ‘largish sums, to several benign institutions’. (Abbott 2005: 20) [The doctors’] actions defied the instructions of members of Congress, who issued subpoenas to attempt to block ‘the barbaric’ removal of her feeding tube on Friday [ : : : ]. (The Guardian online, 20/03/2005)

Recognising the problem, Maier (2007) designed a ‘quote-breaking procedure’, to deal with these examples by breaking them down into smaller constituents. The problem is that the mechanism makes short shrift of the fact that those words were pronounced together as part of a single utterance or sequence of utterances (De Brabanter 2010a: 117f). Maier (2014) accepts a similar objection by Shan (2011), and endorses Shan’s solution, viz. ’unquotation’. This solution is grounded in the widespread practice, in journalism and academic writing, of square-bracketing elements of a quotation that are modified by the quoter, as in (22): (22)

Mr. Graham has resolutely ducked the issue, saying he won’t play the game of rumormongering, even though he has “learned from [his] mistakes.” (Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, p. 624)

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Maier’s key idea is that in an example like (22) the underlying structure is (22UNQ ), where donated represents the reporter’s gloss of the original verb: (22UNQ )

David said that he had ‘[donated] largish sums, to several benign institutions’.

Hence, the hybrid quotation is actually a VP. (See Maier 2014: 54ff for a much more complex and subtle discussion.) In spite of the remarkable ingenuity of Maier’s solution, it is not enough to eliminate the embarrassing quote-breaking strategy. That is because hybrids sometimes extend over a constituent C one or more sentences, as in (23). In cases like these, quote breaking seems inevitable, with the unwelcome consequence that one loses the sense that the various constituents belong together. (23)

His three children attend secular state schools and he welcomes the widening “rift between Church and state. It has happened, it is happening, and for me that’s a great thing. As an atheist, I feel very comfortable in Ireland now.” (The Independent Arts, 17/09/2004).

The Depiction T does not run into these difficulties, since it does not endow hybrids with a semantic interpretation: constituents and non-constituents alike can be quoted at the same time that they are used ordinarily. The only requirement imposed by quotation marks in examples like (23) is that the utterer produce the quoted tokens for some depictive purpose.

14.4.3 ID Rob Stainton writes that “mixed quotation is equivalent to indirect quotation [D ID]—give or take some mimicry” (1999: 275). Recanati concurs (2001: 657 fn16). This would seem to make ID a limiting case of hybrids, a tempting move to make. ‘Pure’ ID exists mainly in written form. Since written reports leave little room for mimicry, it has been assumed that ID was entirely a matter of reporting meaning (D of samesaying) and not of depicting form or manner (wording, delivery). However, as soon as one considers spoken instances of ID, this neat picture becomes messier. First, it appears that ID is often accompanied by some amount of demonstration. Second, as shown in experiments run by Wade and Clark (1993), oral DD reports are not significantly more accurate than oral ID reports. In other words—making allowances for compulsory changes in tense, deixis, and form of pronouns—ID reports are not less depictive of wording than DD reports. Still, one may be reluctant to make the above move. Though they talk of indirect quotation, Clark and Gerrig (1990) treat ID as a variety of the descriptive method of communication. They are right: in its ‘pure’ form, ID is indeed just a matter of describing-as. But are Stainton and Recanati not saying then that a limiting case of hybrid quotation (a type of demonstration) is ID (a type of description)? There appears to be something very wrong here.

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Appearances, however, are deceptive. The paradox results from an incorrect, though widespread, understanding of the issues. It is widely assumed that, just like pure quotation and DD, MQ and ScQ (more generally, hybrids) are varieties of quotation. I have repeatedly made that assumption myself in previous writings. On such a conception, the paradox described above arises. But it can be avoided. To that end, a clear distinction must be made between the communicative acts that go to make a whole utterance, and the parts of an utterance that can be regarded as descriptive or depictive or a combination of these. Consider (24)—example (4) would do too: (24)

The president differentiated militant groups from the “billion Muslims who reject their ideology”. (The Guardian, 19/02/2015)

One can say there are two parts to this utterance. The first is descriptive. The second part, starting with the left quotation mark, is bi-modal, combining description with demonstration. There are also two communicative acts performed. However, these acts do not map onto the parts just mentioned. The first act, a descriptive one, extends over the whole duration of the utterance. The second, a demonstration, concerns the part between quotation marks. In other words, there is no bi-modal act. A hybrid is not, to use Clark’s terms, a composite signal (an act combining description and demonstration). Instead, it is a composite part of a signal. This way, the apparent paradox pointed out above is explained away: there is no claim to the effect that one extreme case of an iconic communicative act is purely descriptive. The reason is that hybrid quotations are not communicative acts, but parts of communicative acts. Consistency then prompts the following reasoning: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v)

quotations are demonstrations, demonstrations are iconic communicative acts, a hybrid10 is not an iconic communicative act, therefore, a hybrid is not a quotation, therefore, so-called mixed quotation and scare quoting are not quotations.

In the next section, I spell out some major implications for a typology of the so-called ‘varieties’ of quotation.

14.4.4 What About the ‘Varieties’ of Quotation? As we saw above, in the first half of the 20th century, philosophers and logicians were essentially concerned with pure quotation. Subsequently, more types of quotation were recognised as deserving to be accounted for by semantic theory.

10 From here on in, I will use the term hybrid as a noun designating that part of a descriptive string that is also (relevantly) accompanied by depiction. For a discussion of whether just any additional depiction generates a hybrid, see Sect. 14.5.2.

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This fostered improved empirical adequacy. What I have called hybrid cases began to attract attention in the 1970s, and not long after that philosophers began to propose typologies of quotation. Thus, Cappelen and Lepore (1997) distinguish between ‘pure’, ‘direct’, ‘indirect’, and ’mixed’ quotation. Wilson (1999) between ‘direct’, ‘indirect’, ‘mixed direct and indirect’, ‘free indirect’ quotation, and ‘nonattributive mention’ [D pure quotation]. Recanati (2001) makes a more basic distinction between ‘closed’ (those quotations that occur in a sentence as a syntactic constituent: pure quotations and canonical instances of DD) and ‘open ‘quotation’ (hybrids and non-canonical DD). It is striking that those scholars name almost all those kinds quotations. These classifications are not without merit. In particular, Recanati’s dichotomy was important as a rhetorical move in heated debates about whether quotation is a matter of semantics or pragmatics: whereas philosophers had generally gone on the assumption that quotations were referential expressions, as reflected in the Name, Description and Demonstrative theories, Recanati rightly contended that referring is a peripheral function fulfilled by only certain types of quotations (the closed cases). However, more fundamental than closed vs. open quotation is the distinction between those occurrences that fully deserve the label ‘quotation’— they are quotations—and those that have a ‘quotational’ dimension but are not quotations. The most sensible way to do this is to start from the premise that quotations are demonstrations, and work consistently from there. Since demonstrations are communicative acts, only those quotation-like phenomena that constitute genuine communicative acts can count as quotations. It is on this basis that I concluded above that hybrids were not quotations. Below, I review the types of phenomena that should or should not be held to be ‘varieties’ of quotation. • The only genuine varieties of quotation are pure quotations and DD, be it closed (as in (7) or (8)) or open, as in (25) below. Both pure quotation and DD are unmixed with a non-iconic mode of communication. (25)

‘Why : : : yes,’ he stammered. ‘Come with me. I’ll give you a good time.’ (BNC ANL)

• Cases in which quotation is mixed with another mode of communication— for our purposes, and maybe simplifying a bit, description—are not types of quotation. Instead, they should be analysed as follows: – a hybrid is both different from and more than an iconic communicative act: each hybrid at once (i) is a mere part of a broader communicative act, and (ii) contains an iconic act. So it is inaccurate to say that a hybrid is a quotation. – instances of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) are composite signals: they are a particular blend of description and depiction, with its own rules. Unfortunately, the literature on FID is way too vast for me to look into those rules in the present article. The table below recapitulates the most significant features of the quotational phenomena just discussed, with the addition of ID (Table 14.1).

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Table 14.1 Six Quotational phenomena and their main features

Pure quotation DD (closed) DD (open) Hybrid FID ID

Is an iconic act Yes Yes Yes No (it’s more) No (it’s more) No

Is mixed with other mode of commu. No No No Yes Yes No

Is a composite signal No No No No Yes No

Includes iconic act as component Yes (itself) Yes (itself) Yes (itself) Yes Yes No

Variety of quotation? Yes Yes Yes No No No

14.5 Delimiting Quotation At this stage, it may seem that we have solved the issue of the delimitation of the phenomenon ‘quotation’. This would be welcome; after all, this whole article advocates a particular theory of quotation. Simply drawing the implications from the notion that quotations are demonstrations has allowed us to show that hybrid ‘quotations’, FID, and ID are not varieties of quotation, notwithstanding the fact that the former two exhibit quotation-like aspects. Some difficulties, however, remain. In the next two sections, I look at nonlinguistic quotations and at cases of depictions produced while there is no speech or thought report, nor ‘talk about words’.

14.5.1 Nonlinguistic Quotations Section 14.2.1 included an example of what, following Clark & Gerrig, I called ‘nonlinguistic’ quotation: “gzzhhd”. But can we be sure it deserves the label ‘quotation’? Wilson (1999), for instance, envisages no example of quotation that is not, at the same time, metarepresentational. If metarepresentation is constitutive of quotation, one should recognise only two major types of quotation, (i) metarepresentations of utterances or thoughts attributed to some agent; (ii) metarepresentations of non-attributed representations (D pure quotation). Relying on linguistic evidence, Clark & Gerrig (preemptively) disagree. Their main argument goes as follows: go can be used to introduce DD, as in (26), where the quotation metarepresents attributively, to use Wilson’s terms. But go can also introduce examples like (27), in which its complement is at best only indirectly metarepresentational— it indicates that the referent of he did say something, but does not show what. (28) has a non-linguistic representation of a non-linguistic representation (albeit a communicative act); (29) a linguistic representation of something that is not a representation; and (30) (and (6)), non-linguistic (but speech-sound) representations of non-representational things.

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P. De Brabanter And she goes ‘Dad, I wrecked your car, I’m so sorry.’ (CoCA) So he went blah, blah, blah, blah again and finally he got them to come out. (Google) The boy went [RUDE GESTURE] and ran away. (Clark 1996: 175) The piano goes “plonk” and the guitar goes “twang”. (Google) [That radio alarm clock] went crrrkkkkkk for a few minutes, that’s why I kept hitting it. (BNC KCX)

If, based on their compatibility with ‘quotative’ go, we treat all the demonstrations featured above as quotations, then neither metarepresentation nor inherent linguistic character are necessary conditions for quotationhood. If, in contrast, we take metarepresentation and inherent linguistic character to be criterial, then, except for (26), none of the above demonstrations are quotations. But then the theorist will have to explain why these demonstrations can combine with introducers of quotation such as go or be like. She will also have to say something on the use of quotation marks in (29). In the end, the debate may amount to no more than a terminological issue. The Depiction theorist is free to go either way. Whatever her stance on this question, what she needs is a good theory of demonstrations. Whether the particular demonstrations just illustrated will be labelled ‘quotations’ may be of only secondary importance.

14.5.2 Depiction in the Absence of Speech/Thought Report or Talk About Words In describing their own category of ‘hybrid quotations’, Clark and Gerrig (1990: 791) initially discuss cases like the following invented example, which I would also classify as a hybrid, because it consists in the addition of mimicry to an ID report: (31)

And then Mrs. Dewlap said that he [raising voice] COULD JUST WAIT FOR HIS TURN WITH THE REST OF THEM [lowering voice] and so he did.

What sets (31) apart from more traditional instances of utterances containing MQ is that (i) there are no quotation marks; (ii) it does not purport to depict the very words used by the reported speaker, but some aspect of her delivery. To me, this is enough for the demonstration in (31) to contribute to the generation of a hybrid. But what of examples like (32)? (32)

And then Mrs. Dewlap [raising voice] YELLED AND SCREAMED AND HOLLERED [lowering voice] at William and so he decided to leave.

The demonstration, though it evokes previous utterances of Mrs. Dewlap’s, is not concomitant with an actual speech or thought report. This absence of a clear metarepresentational dimension makes it similar to a large number of iconic cospeech gestures which no one has ever wanted to regard as involving quotation, witness (33), from Kendon (2004: 114):

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He used to go down there and throw [0.3 second pause] ground rice over it. [————————————————––] GESTURE LIKE SCATTERING POWDER OR DUST

This is not a knock-down argument. Once again, a slippery slope argument could take us from (31), which has a quotational dimension, to (33), which at first sight has none at all, through (32), which, depicting an aspect of the delivery of an utterance act, occupies an intermediate position. I am personally reluctant to embark on this slippery slope, but this may be no better than a terminological fiat.

14.5.3 Some Conclusions In Sects. 14.5.1 and 14.5.2, we have seen that one can be more or less conservative in drawing the boundaries of quotation and quotational phenomena. From Clark & Gerrig’s very liberal perspective, neither metarepresentation nor inherent linguistic character is necessary to there being quotation. On the other hand, the view that takes metarepresentation and inherent linguistic character to be indispensable may appear too restrictive indeed. In the end, this difficulty in drawing the boundaries remains an issue for all theorists of quotation. And, I contend, theorists who take quotation marks to be criterial end up making much more arbitrary choices than the Depiction theorist. In Sect. 14.6. I recapitulate the ingredients of an adequate theory of quotation.

14.6 Requisites for a Theory of Quotation Below are reviewed some core conditions that a theory of quotation must meet if it is to be successful both from a descriptive and an explanatory point of view.

14.6.1 Doing Justice to the Actual Mechanisms Underlying Quotations The theory that is needed is one that takes seriously the insight that quotations are a type of demonstration, never mind the fuzzy limits of the category ‘quotation’. None of the initial four competing theories regards the depictive character as central. The Name T (and, especially, the Description T) were expressly devised to downplay it. The Demonstrative T takes indexicality, not iconicity, to be fundamental. The Identity T mistakes identity for resemblance as the key relation.

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The theory defended in this article is alone in addressing the fact that (at least, spoken) utterances are often composite signals, made up in varying degrees of depiction, indication, and description. Pragmaticists in the Gricean tradition tend to pay lip service to this view while maintaining an almost exclusive focus on the verbal aspects of utterances. Yet, as Carston states, the domain of pragmatics is a natural class of environmental phenomena, that of ostensive (Dcommunicative) stimuli; verbal utterances are the central case, but not the only one, and they themselves are frequently accompanied by other ostensive gestures of the face, hands, voice, etc, all of which have to be interpreted together if one is to correctly infer what is being communicated. (2002: 129)

At the time of her writing this, this fact remained “rather underexplored” (Carston 2000: 824). A Depiction Theory of quotation was (and remains) a significant step in the right direction. Another crucial feature of the Depiction T is that it does not overstate the significance of quotation marks. Even such a sophisticated recent account of the syntax and semantics of mixed quotation as Maier (2014) treats them as central, with a number of undesirable consequences: – First, on quotation-marks-based semantic accounts, it is not an act of the quoter’s that constitutes the quotation, but the utterer’s choice of a particular linguistic tool—quotation marks. On such an account quoting falls under describing-as; it is no different from linguistic acts of reference or predication, which require using a variety of linguistic tools too (NPs, VPs, etc.). – Second, granting excessive importance to quotation marks may eventuate in separate theories for written and spoken quotations. This remains a major danger as long as it has not been empirically established that spoken quotations have systematic and conventional prosodic counterparts of quotation marks. No such evidence exists to this day. – Third, scholars have widely assumed that hybrids could not exist without quotation marks. But that was because they mostly considered only Cappelen & Lepore’s narrow MQ. In actual fact, not even hybrids need quotation marks, as shown by example (31). – Fourth, if quotation marks are central to quotation, then they are also polysemous. When occurring with pure quotation and DD, their meaning will be something like “the expression of which a token is here”. In combination with hybrids, it will be “whatever some salient speaker x referred to when she uttered ¢” (Maier 2014: 25). I have endorsed Recanati’s (2001) suggestion that quotation marks are mere ‘indicators’ that the enclosed words are displayed for some depictive purpose. Who needs the extra complication of polysemous quotation marks when there exists a theory which can do the same work with monosemous ones?11

11

For a more detailed discussion of quote marks and desirable features of quotation theories, see De Brabanter (2013b: 137–142).

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– Fifth, though quotation marks are useful indicators, they are not a reliable heuristic for the identification of quotations. Many quotations are unmarked or use different marking (e.g. italics). And we also saw that their prominence in Cappelen & Lepore’s account of MQ may be partly responsible for the undue identification of hybrids as a variety of quotation. My point is certainly not that no ‘semanticist-about-quotation’ recognises any of those pitfalls. It is simply to highlight perils which I think have been underestimated in the literature. To sum up, the key requirement for a satisfactory theory of quotation is that it be depiction-based, and, as a corollary, that it not fetishise quotation marks. This core, however, needs to be supplemented by a series of components, each of which addresses genuine empirical issues in ways that are consistent with the core theory. It is to the description of these components that I now turn.

14.6.2 The Additional Components 14.6.2.1

The Semantic Component

There are two main reasons for developing a semantics of quotation: (i) quotation marks have a conventional meaning; (ii) closed quotations make a semantic contribution to the quoting sentences in which they occur. Regarding (i), I have argued above that quotation marks were not necessary to quoting. This does not mean that they are devoid of meaning. A lot of the controversies around quotation have revolved around that meaning. Most semanticistsabout-quotation appear to assume that quotation marks are polysemous. Only if one endows quotation marks with a largely underdetermined meaning—“the enclosed token is displayed for depictive purposes”—can one uphold a monosemous picture. This is what Recanati did in 2001, and, I have argued, this is the right way to go. Turning now to (ii), positing the recruitment of demonstrations as referential expressions does not, as is too often assumed, force the theorist to endorse the ‘verbatim’ assumption, i.e. the assumption that closed quotations must reproduce their target word-for-word. This is an assumption that nearly all semantic theories buy into. Clark and Gerrig (1990) and Wade and Clark (1993) have emphasised both the conceptual and the empirical problems with such an assumption. What happens instead is that lexical resemblance is a matter of degree, and that standards of resemblance are context-dependent.12 The Depiction T, with its understanding of demonstrations as partial and selective predicts this contextual variability. It might seem as if verbatimness is an issue that concerns only DD, not pure quotations.

12

Maier (2014: 4–5) is the only semanticist I am aware of who recognises this explicitly.

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However, even in the latter context, standards of lexical resemblance can sometimes be lowered, witness (37), where through stands for different words from various languages: (34)

For example, English speakers can say The dog ran through the forest but not The dog ran through the table (they have to say The dog ran under the table); speakers of certain other languages have to use the word through for both. (S. Pinker 1990. Language acquisition. In D. N. Osherson & H. Lasnik (eds.), An invitation to cognitive science. Vol. 1: Language. MIT Press, p. 201)

Another pitfall is the assumption that all truth-conditional effects must be explained by the semantic theory. In the next subsection, I sketch a picture in which some of these effects are pragmatic in essence. 14.6.2.2

The Truth-Conditional Component

This component overlaps with the semantic component as far as the truthconditional impact of closed quotations is concerned. The impact of hybrids on truth conditions, on the other hand, is a matter of pragmatics. Can the ‘robust intuition’ mentioned in Sect. 14.4.2—that the referent of the subject of the reporting verb in MQ must have uttered the quoted words—be accounted for on the Depiction T? We saw that it can, without modification of the skeletal conventional meaning of quotation marks. Free pragmatic enrichment of truth-conditions allows one to explain truth-conditional effects when they do crop up—as with example (4)—and also their potential suspension in examples like (16). Note that such examples can also be dealt with by a theory à la Benbaji or Geurts & Maier, which may require that speech be attributed to some contextually salient speaker. As Gómez-Torrente (2005) has forcefully argued, it seems difficult to deny that the quoted words are ascribed to some agent in the way predicted by these theories. However, as we saw in Sect. 14.6.1, the price to pay for adopting such a theory is polysemy of quotation marks. In Sect. 14.4.2.1, I argued that non-cumulative hybrids require a different treatment, in terms of context-shifts. In example (19), it was the situation of utterance which underwent a shift. In the following real-life example, it is the language parameter: a close relative of mine sometimes has trouble finding his words. He is known to have requested a ‘poplar’ instead of a toothpick at the end of a meal. Out of mischief I will say things like (35) during a family reunion, with a wink or some other clue that I am being playful: (35)

OK, I’ll fetch you a ‘poplar’.

The word poplar is used with the meaning it has in my relative’s (temporary) idiolect, not in standard English. That is why (35) can be judged true if I bring back a toothpick. As argued in 4.2.1, this shift is a pragmatic mechanism on a par with ‘pre-semantic’ disambiguation.

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Now these examples too might be amenable to a Benbaji-type treatment, hinting that this kind of semantic account can deal with a vast majority of hybrids. Why resist going that way then? Again, because of the depictive nature of quotations. Reimer (2005: 180f) imagines a language in which variations of font size are used iconically to indicate loudness. She remarks that if Alice spoke very loud and her words are reported as in (36), then one would likely judge the utterance to be false: (36)

Alice said that life is difficult to understand.

This was supposed to appear in much smaller font…

(36) is a hybrid of the type discussed in Sect. 14.5.2. Cases like (36), in which the features relevant for truth-evaluation go beyond the meaning of the quoted words, cannot be captured by glosses like “whatever some salient speaker x referred to when she uttered ¢”. Real-life examples can certainly be found in speech. It seems the semanticist-about-quotation cannot account for them, short of distinguishing an extra sense of (covert!) quotation marks, to do with loudness. Maybe other senses will have to be devised for other aspects of delivery. The pragmaticist-aboutquotation has no need for this sort of inflationary polysemy. One last point to close this section. Stainton (1999: 273f) has argued that mismatches to do with the manner of speech (as in 36) cause infelicity rather than falsity, and that this is actually the rule for mixed-quoted words. Taken as a general statement, this is certainly false (cf. Reimer 2005: 171ff). But one should not make the reverse mistake of assuming that this or that aspect is always truth-conditionally relevant. That would be in conflict with the property of selectivity at the core of depictions. 14.6.2.3

The Morphosyntactic Component

The mechanism by which the Depiction T accounts for closed quotations is Recanati’s ‘syntactic recruitment’ of a demonstration. This mechanism may initially come across as odd: how can an iconic act ever function as, say, a grammatical subject? I can offer no definitive answer to this question here. Let me just point out that something like that mechanism must be posited, because not all quotations are closed cases. (In Sect. 14.7, I briefly discuss open instances of DD.) I should also mention that, although more research is certainly needed, it seems that gestural demonstrations too can function as syntactic constituents of sentences (De Brabanter 2010b). In which syntactic positions is recruitment (or some similar mechanism) possible? Consider the interesting difference between the next two examples: (37) (38)

A ‘fortnight’ is a period of fourteen days. The text contains one fortnight.

(37) contains a cumulative hybrid. Disquotation has no semantic or syntactic impact on the quoting sentence. By contrast, (38) contains a closed quotation, which is recruited as an N and functions as head of an NP. Substitution of a name, description

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or demonstrative for fortnight in (38) results in ungrammaticality. Consider further that quotations can be recruited in further syntactic capacities, as modifiers (39) or predicators (40): (39) (40)

Barry gives a what-can-you-do-with-this-guy shrug and walks out. (N. Hornby 1995. High Fidelity. Indigo, p. 61) Their two graces do so dear-cousin and royal-cousin him. (OED, IV, 301, col. 2)

The strings in bold cannot be hybrid quotations. Remove the quotational dimension and ungrammaticality results, at least to the extent that these strings have not been lexicalised. Contrary to the Name, Description and Demonstrative theories, all of which equate quotations with a specific grammatical category, the Depiction T has no trouble accounting for recruitment in other-than-NP positions. (For further discussion, see De Brabanter (2005b) and Pascual (2014)). Another point about the grammar of closed quotations is that, even if initially plural, they are singular when recruited as NPs. Compare: (41) (42)

The children are alseep ‘The children’ is an NP.

This is something that the Name and Demonstrative Theories can explain, but not the Identity T: if a quotation is just another use of the same expression, how come it changes number? What of the Depiction T? Maybe singular number can be said to result from the fact that what is recruited is a single communicative act. At any rate, the Depiction T is under no serious threat, because, unlike the Identity T, it makes no commitment to the quotation being identical to the quoted expression. The Depiction T may have an edge over the first two when it comes to describing certain phenomena peculiar to French. Usually, a French definite article preceding a quotation recruited as an N and starting with a vowel is not elided (43), whereas it would be if it were followed by an ordinary N (44) (cf. Rey-Debove 1978: 65f): (43) (44)

Le animal à la troisième ligne a été remplacé par bête. L’animal a été vendu par des braconniers.

In (43), animal is a pure quotation, and this is marked by the fact that the -e in le is not elided in front of the vowel. There is no obvious reason why this would happen if closed quotations were standard linguistic entities like names or demonstratives. If closed quotations are recruited iconic acts, however, it is perhaps to be expected that definite articles will behave unusually in front of them. Still, as Rey-Debove shows, the data are messy, with other function words often undergoing elision in front of a vowel-initial closed quotation—see (45). Hence, no firm conclusions can be drawn: (45)

L’étymologie d’animal.

The last point I wish to bring up concerns hybrids. Consider examples like (46) and (47):

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He wrote that Kant was “my wife’s favoritest philososopher”. (from Maier 2014) [Each tablet in the war cemetery] would commemorate Monsieur Un Tel, lâchement assassiné par les Allemands, or tué, or fusillé, and then an insulting modern date: 1943, 1944, 1945. (J. Barnes 1996. Cross Channel. Picador, p. 105)

What happens if the quotational dimension is removed? We get the strings in (460 ) and (470 ). It is not easy not to read them as hybrids, but that is how they should be read: (460 ) (470 )

He wrote that Kant was my wife’s favoritest philososopher. Each tablet in the war cemetery would commemorate Monsieur Un Tel, lâchement assassiné par les Allemands, or tué, or fusillé, and then an insulting modern date: 1943, 1944, 1945.

The question is whether these strings are grammatical at all. (460 ) appears ungrammatical in English, given the impossible superlative favoritest and the non-word philososopher. (470 ) might perhaps be grammatical, provided it could be shown to be underlain by grammatical rules similar to those underlying code-switching. But a preliminary question that must be asked is if (46) and (47) themselves are grammatical. If they are and the disquoted versions are not, then a demonstration— an iconic act—affects grammaticality. The Depiction T would then have to take up the challenge of addressing this fact.

14.7 Open DD/Free-Standing Quotations In this last section, I briefly examine a neglected type of DD, which Clark & Gerrig have dubbed ‘free-standing quotations’ (1990: 772). They are instances of DD that are not governed by a reporting verb or noun. They can occur with or without a parenthetical reporting frame. Both possibilities are illustrated in (25): (25)

‘Why : : : yes,’ he stammered. ‘Come with me. I’ll give you a good time.’ [repeated]

These, according to Recanati, are open quotations. They are not recruited to fulfil a syntactic function, either as complements or modifiers. This is especially uncontentious when there is no other constituent in the sentence. Again, those theories that take quotations to be referential expressions are hard put to explain these occurrences. By way of illustration, here is how Davidson’s theory should represent the semantics of the second quotation in (25): (25DEM )

The expression of which a token is here. Come with me. I’ll give you a good time

The utterance is downgraded to a mere NP. No speech act is represented as being performed, not even a nonserious one. As for Cappelen & Lepore’s modified Demonstrative T, it has no way of representing (25), since its account of DD relies entirely on a verb of saying triggering the presence of the ‘sametokening’ predicate in the truth-conditions. The very existence of open DD seals the fate of the Demonstrative T.

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The Depiction T treats the quotations in (25) as pure demonstrations not embedded into an act of descriptive communication. This is nothing unusual. Go back to my imitation of Hendrix’s soloing. This can be introduced by some description, say, I’m going to show you how Jimi did it in Woodstock. But the nonverbal demonstration that follows can occur on its own, with no words having to be uttered.

14.8 Wrapping Up In this paper, I have argued that only a pragmatic theory that embraces the view that quotations are iconic acts and therefore not inherently linguistic can do justice to quotation. I have shown that this Depiction Theory is more empirically adequate than its competitors. I have also used it as the basis for a reorganisation of the domain of quotation, suggesting notably that ‘hybrid quotations’ are not quotations. I have also pointed at a number of problems to do with the delimitation of the category ‘quotation’. Lastly, I have offered hints as to the extra components that should complement the pragmatic core of the theory, in order to deal with issues to do with semantics, truth-conditions, and grammar. Acknowledgement I am grateful to Emma Vanden Wyngaerd and to an anonymous reviewer for useful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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