Two Accounts of Indexicals in Mixed Quotation

Abstract

When the indexical 'I' appears inside quotation marks, it refers not to the person now speaking but to the person whose speech is being reported. The apparently 'monstrous' 1 behaviour of quotation can be dismissed in direct speech, so long as one maintains that the quoted part is mentioned rather than used. The same cannot be maintained, however, in so-called 'mixed' quotation, for which a pure-mention analysis is implausible. In this paper I compare two accounts of the semantics of quotation.

Scare-Quoting and Incorporation

“…Third, semanticizing treatments require generalization beyond noun phraseseven beyond constituents, as some writers have emphasized (Abbott 2005;Cumming 2005). To this technical problem there is perhaps a technical solution: perhaps any scare-quoted non-constituent could be seen as the result of scare-quoting some larger constituent and unquoting as necessary, to get to the scare-quoted non-constituent.…”

CRITICAL NOTICE OF LANGUAGE TURNED ON ITSELF, BY HERMAN CAPPELEN AND ERNIE LEPORE

“…Or is there a restriction ensuring that mixed quotational “that” clauses are complements only to “said?” Finally, as Cappelen and Lepore note, this approach is restricted to handling only mixed quotations whose quotation‐marked parts are of some syntactic category. This is a nontrivial assumption, and it has been denied (Cumming 2003; McCullagh 2007). Cappelen and Lepore say “the data are mixed” on this, but they do not elaborate, and I am not sure what they mean by that.…”

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Hybrid Quotations

“…There is one last empirical fact about hybrid quotation that deserves attention: quoted strings need not be syntactic constituents (cf. Clark and Gerrig 1990: 790; Abbott 2005: 20; Cumming 2005: 81; Tsohatzidis 2005: 228; Maier 2007). This feature is significant because it spells more trouble for the semantic accounts.…”

“…What is remarkable here is the occurrence of an indexical in the quotation. These sorts of cases have been studied in detail by Cumming (2005 The data examined in this section show that the partition of hybrid quotations into MQ and ScQ is barely tenable. Theories that explicitly rely on such a division are in trouble (Benbaji, C&L, Gómez-Torrente).…”

“…What is remarkable here is the occurrence of an indexical in the quotation. These sorts of cases have been studied in detail by Cumming (2005). C&L themselves have used one such example – though under the scope of a reporting verb – in an argument against pragmatic accounts of hybrid quotation (2005: 63f).…”