Linguistics (Mar 2023)
Quotation does not need marks of quotation
Abstract
Two major types of quotation theories can be distinguished according to whether they regard marks of quotation as necessary (type-1) or not necessary (type-2) for quotation. I argue that taken at face value, the empirical evidence disqualifies type-1 theories. I then show that even if we accept that surface appearances can be deceptive – ‘unmarked’ quotations are simply not quotations, or absent marks are underlain by marks in hidden syntactic structure – type-1 theories still prove inadequate. By contrast, a particular form of type-2 theory, depiction theory, is consistent with the empirical evidence, proves compatible with syntactic analyses that posit a covert quotative operator, and is equipped to account for the grammatically deviant behavior of certain categories of quotations.
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