The character of quotation.

This paper presents syntactic and semantic rules for a fragment of English with mixed quotation. The fragment shows that quotation has a recursive and compositional structure. Quoted expressions turn out to denote characters, so the semantics of quotation simulates the pragmatics of speech, includin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Linguistics & Philosophy Vol. 33; no. 5; pp. 417 - 444
Main Author: Shan, Chung-chieh
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Oct2010
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary:This paper presents syntactic and semantic rules for a fragment of English with mixed quotation. The fragment shows that quotation has a recursive and compositional structure. Quoted expressions turn out to denote characters, so the semantics of quotation simulates the pragmatics of speech, including dependence on utterance contexts and reference to mental entities. The analysis also accommodates varieties of unquotation, pure quotation, and causal reference.