Characterizing Quotation

The quotes in (3) and (4) mention the quoted expression without using them. We can analyze these quotes as simply denoting the quoted expressions, which have properties such as having eight letters and being said by Quine. In contrast, the embedded clause in (5) is a quote only in that it uses—not mentions—the expression quotation has a certain anomalous feature to express a proposition attributed to Quine. Hence, it is easy to imagine a situation where (5) holds but (4) does not: perhaps Quine never uttered the word anomalous. What is special about the quotes in (1) and (2) is that they mix mention and use. On one hand, these sentences hardly hold if Quine never uttered anomalous and Bush never uttered eckullectic. On the other hand, in order to compose the meanings of quotation ‘has a certain anomalous feature’ and ‘eckullectic’ reading list, we need the quotes to denote verb-phrase and adjectival meanings, which can apply to quotation and reading lists, rather than expressions, which cannot. One way to analyze the syntax and semantics of mixed quotation is to formulate some syntactic and semantic rules that generate a fragment of English with mixed quotation. This paper presents such a formal fragment, to show that quotation has a recursive and compositional structure, as we have come to expect in language and study in linguistics. It turns out in the fragment that quoted expressions denote characters (Kaplan 1989), 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 (Putnam 1975, Kripke 1980).