The Character of Quotation

Friday, 5 November 2010, Syntax Colloquia

Chung-chieh Shan, Rutgers University

Abstract

A paradigmatic example of metalinguistic behavior is quotation. Unlike a pure quote, a mixed quote embeds both the syntax and the semantics of the quoted language in the quoting language. For example, the sentence

Bush is proud of his ‘eckullectic’ reading list

is grammatical only because Bush uses “eckullectic” as an adjective, and it means that Bush is proud of his eclectic reading list only because Bush uses “eckullectic” to mean eclectic.

I analyze mixed quotation by letting the syntactic categories of the quoting language embed those of the quoted language and the semantic values of the quoting language be Kaplan’s characters of the quoted language. For example, because “eckullectic” has the category N/N in Bush English, “eckullectic” in the sentence above has the category (N/N)’, and it denotes the character of “eckullectic” in Bush English.

My formal fragment shows how quotation, like the rest of language, is recursive in syntax and compositional in semantics. In fact, the same analysis generalizes to subsume not just pure quotation but all language except coinage, so between linguistic and metalinguistic behavior is not a sharp boundary but a spectrum of hyperintensionality.