semantic minimalism and moderte contextualism.

Understanding quotation is fundamental to understanding the nature of truth and meaning. Quotation, however, is a remarkably complicated phenomenon, and a vigorous literature on the topic has been growing at an increasing rate.§1 To give you a sense of this work, §1 enlarges upon the significance of studying quotation; §2 presents a rudimentary taxonomy of quotation; and §3 critically surveys theories of how quotation works.

This paper argues that the practice of employing bare pairs of quotation marks to represent the empty string in formal linguistics and computer science is well-founded in the implicit conventions governing the use of quotation marks in natural language. In the framework of the Inscriptional Theory of Quotation (ITQ), it is argued that sentences containing empty quotation (i.e., empty quotational sentences) are grammatical and meaningful. Furthermore, the notion of an empty string is employed in the analysis of reported speech to (...) provide a unified account that identifies mixed quotation as the primary form of reported speech. (shrink)

Every theory of pure quotation embraces in some form or another the intuitively obvious thesis that pure quotations refer to their quoted expressions. However, they all remain vague about the nature of these latter. This paper proposes to take seriously the fact that quoted items are semantic, not syntactic objects, and to develop therefrom a semantics for pure quotation that retains the basic intuitions and at the same time circumvents standard problems.