The phenomenon of mixed quotation exhibits clear signs of both the apparent transparency of compositional language use and the opacity of pure quotation. I argue that the interpretation of a mixed quotation involves the resolution of a metalinguistic presupposition. The leading idea behind my proposal is that a mixed-quoted expression, say, “has an anomalous feature”, means what x referred to w...

Contrary to the widely held presumption that quotations are quantificationally opaque, I argue that quantification into quotational contexts is in fact possible, although only in a very limited way. Specifically, I show that quantification over expressions, or metalinguistic quantification, into quotational contexts is attested in natural language. The main empirical support comes from Japanese...

introduction: mental sets are clues which are already coded and stored in memory, and retrieved when needed. the present study investigated the role of mental sets in solving anagram problems. methods: the design of this study is an experimental with repeated measurement design. the participants were 20 ma students and graduates chosen through voluntary sampling. each of them were required to u...

The purpose of this study was to better understand the relationship between delayed linguistic performance and metalinguistic abilities. A metalinguistic task involving the identification and revision of syntactic, semantic, and phonologic errors was administered to 10 normal and 10 language-disordered children of comparable mental age and receptive language abilities. The two groups performed ...

The metalinguistic facilities of natural language are crucial to our ability to communicate, but the patterns behind the appearance of metalanguage—and thus the clues for how we may instruct computers to detect it—have remained relatively unknown. This paper describes the first results on the feasibility of automatically identifying metalanguage in English text. A core metalinguistic vocabulary...

David Kaplan's semantic theory for indexicals yields a distinct logic indexical languages that generates contingent priori truths. These special truths of the include examples like "I am here now", an utterance which expresses state affairs and yet which, according to Kaplan, cannot fail be true when it is uttered. This claim threatened by problem displaced communications: answerphone messages,...