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Monsters and I: The Case of Mixed Quotation

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The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 15))

Abstract

According to Kaplan (Demonstratives: An essay on the semantics, logic, metaphysics, and epistemology of demonstratives and other indexicals. In: J Almog, J Perry, H. Wettstein (eds) Themes from Kaplan. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 481–563, 1989a), the semantic value of an indexical is fixed by the context of the current speech act, except for its occurrences in quotation. However, contrary to this thesis, now known as ‘Fixity’ (Schlenker, A plea for monsters, Linguist Philos 26:29–120, 2003), subsequent discussions have demonstrated that the content of pure indexicals can be fixed by the intended speech act (Predelli, Erkenntnis 74:289–303, Analysis, 2011). Cross-linguistically, Fixity also proves untenable for languages such as Amharic where the referent of a first-person pronoun can be drawn from the reporting context or the reported situation (Schlenker). In this paper we focus on the variety of ways the English first-person singular pronoun is interpreted in quotation, focusing on mixed quotation, and argue that (i) mixed quotation is a case of language use and, pace Kaplan, the behaviour of first-person pronouns in mixed quotation is relevant for, and testifies against, Fixity; (ii) mixed quotation induces context-shifts or a generalisation over contexts that can be captured in terms of what we call ‘character-at-issue’ and ‘content-at-issue’ uses; and (iii) the extant contextualist accounts that appear to be best suited to account for the diversity of use do not pursue the interpretation of first-person pronouns in quotation to its logical end. To remedy this weakness we demonstrate how the use of first-person indexicals in these Fixity-defying contexts (Kaplan’s ‘monster’ contexts) can be accounted for in the radical contextualist theory of Default Semantics (Jaszczolt, Default semantics: Foundations of a compositional theory of acts of communication. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005; Default semantics. In: B Heine, H Narrog (eds) The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 215–246, 2010; Meaning in linguistic interaction: semantics, metasemantics, philosophy of language. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016). Overall, we conclude that ‘I’ is not an indexical term and quotation is not a monster, which points to the possibility that indexicals are a philosophers’ fiction.

The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68747-6_14

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See e.g. Predelli 2011 for pertinent references.

  2. 2.

    Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993).

  3. 3.

    But note that Schlenker (2003: 89–90) points out that ‘only’ in (2) acts akin to a syntactic binder. Cf. ‘Not only I admitted what I did wrong; Peter did too’.

  4. 4.

    See also Jaszczolt (2016, chapter 5) for a discussion.

  5. 5.

    Note that Kaplan (1989b: 591) does not exclude the possibility that more parameters constitute context as an index: “context provides whatever parameters are needed”. See Jaszczolt 2012 for a discussion.

  6. 6.

    We use italics (I) to mark a concept and single quotes to mark a lexical item (‘I’).

  7. 7.

    For an extensive discussion and further examples of languages displaying ‘monstrous’ behaviour see Roberts (2014).

  8. 8.

    Scare quoting may be regarded as a sub-type of reportive quoting, with the extra function of indicating non-standard uses. See De Brabanter (2010) for detailed arguments.

  9. 9.

    The original intended referent is usually the one intended by the quotee, which, crucially, need not be the standard semantic referent. For example, when a name appears in quote and it is clear from the context that the quotee has mistaken the bearer of the name with someone else, the quoted name would refer to what the quotee intended to refer to, instead of its standard referent (Recanati 2001: 668). Nonetheless, if the quotee is in turn echoing someone else, as in the following example from Geurts and Maier (2005: 122), the original intended referent is one that is intended by the speaker from whom the quoted material originates.

    (*)

    George called the ‘POlice’. … Tony called the ‘POlice’, too.

    There is a reading of (*) in which Tony echoes George, in which case both quoted occurrences of “POlice” mean “whatever it is [that] George referred to using the expression ‘POlice’” (ibid. 123).

  10. 10.

    “A quotation which is not closed is (as one might expect) open” (Recanati 2010: 402).

  11. 11.

    Strict syntactic arguments do not seem independently justified: the fact that the quoted material need not be present for the sentence to be grammatical seems tangential to the discussion of the conceptual content.

  12. 12.

    See Collins and Postal 2012 on the so-called ‘imposters’.

  13. 13.

    As a result, these languages abound in first-person markers. For Thai, 27 such forms have been identified (Siewierska 2004: 228; Heine and Song 2011), and for Japanese, including archaic forms, 51 (Tanaka 2012 and p.c.). See Jaszczolt (2013a, 2016) for a discussion.

  14. 14.

    ‘Otherwise conveyed’ because the material in quotes need not directly depict the speaker’s words; it can represent types or tokens, concepts or forms (see e.g. Saka 1998 on metalinguistic use and Wilson 2000 on metarepresenting).

  15. 15.

    Besides semantically foregrounding the character of the quoted material, these examples are complex in another way, namely that the quotations in them function syntactically as modifiers, as pointed out by a reviewer of this volume (see De Brabanter 2005; de Vries 2008; Pascual 2014 for discussions). The fact that they are recruited to demonstrate a type of de se attitude also challenges the traditional view of ‘mixed quotation’ in terms of deferred reference (see §2.1).

  16. 16.

    ‘Standardised’ but not ‘conventionalised’: they are still compositional, albeit have a slightly limited syntactic penetrability, see Bach (1995).

  17. 17.

    See Sect. 4 for a contextualist semantic representation of this mini-discourse that reflects this order of interpretation.

  18. 18.

    See fn. 16.

  19. 19.

    Still fulfilling the criterion of being types rather than tokens: they pertain to meanings of expressions that can undergo a context-free classification.

  20. 20.

    Available at http://www.michigan.gov/snyder/0,4668,7-277-61409_61412_61527-254556--,00.html. Accessed 8 August 2016.

  21. 21.

    We shall not be discussing here non-linguistic material in the scope of quotation marks. See e.g. Cappelen and Lepore (2007) for a uniform minimalist account.

  22. 22.

    In this context see also Capone (2013) on quotation as social practice and a language game.

  23. 23.

    Cf. also Saka’s (1998) quotation marks as subscripts, indicating metalinguistic use.

  24. 24.

    It is possible to envisage a scenario on which an addressee has to consciously process information that the situation is that of copy-editing. On such a scenario, instead of WS+SCWD we have WS+CPI. It is the fact of discourse that the representations will vary in this way and all that the algorithmic account can capture is the options for arriving at an interpretation – perhaps ranked options when the preceding context points in the direction of one or the other process. See Jaszczolt (2010) for a discussion and fn. 25 below.

  25. 25.

    Note that DS aims at representing the primary meanings as intended by Model Speakers and recovered by Model Addressees. This is a way of ensuring the predictive power of the theory and the availability of an algorithmic account. The flip side of this perspective is, of course, that any change in the content of the sources of information on a given occasion can result in a different meaning. In other words, while the theory offers a model that demonstrates how pragmatic, interactive compositionality of meaning works, in the case of made-up examples such as (11) where there is no access to the real content of the sources, we will never be able to produce one unique merger representation and claim it is a correct one. In other words, with gaps in information, we will simply never know what it ought to be.

  26. 26.

    Σ captures the idea of the summation of information coming from the sources identified in DS, and a fortiori the idea of interactive compositionality of the meanings of speech acts.

  27. 27.

    Research leading to this paper was supported by The Leverhulme Trust Grant Expressing the Self: Cultural Diversity and Cognitive Universals (Grant ID/Ref: RPG-2014-017). We owe thanks to the audiences of the seminar The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation at the American Philosophical Association meeting in Vancouver, the panel The Dynamics of Self-Expression across Languages at the 14th International Pragmatics Association conference in Antwerp, the Cambridge Linguistics Forum, and Paul Saka and Alessandro Capone for their comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Kasia M. Jaszczolt

  2. Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Minyao Huang

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  1. Kasia M. Jaszczolt
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  2. Minyao Huang
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Correspondence to Kasia M. Jaszczolt .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Texas, Rio Grande, Edinburg, Texas, USA

    Paul Saka

  2. University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong

    Michael Johnson

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Jaszczolt, K.M., Huang, M. (2017). Monsters and I: The Case of Mixed Quotation. In: Saka, P., Johnson, M. (eds) The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68747-6_13

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