Do We Pronounce Quotation? An Analysis of Name-informing and Non-name-informing Contexts

Quotation marks are a tool to refer to the linguistic form of an expression. For instance, in cases of so-called pure quotation as in “Hanover” has three syllables, they point to the syllabic characteristics of the name of the town of Hanover. Cases of this nature differ from sentences like Hanover is a town in New Hampshire, in which Hanover is used denotationally and, thus, refers to the town of Hanover itself. Apart from quotation marks, other means such as italics, bold, capitalization, or air quotes represent potential means to signal a non-stereotypical use of an item in the written or gestural mode. It is far less clear, however, whether acoustic correlates of quotation marks exist. The present contribution aims at investigating this issue by focusing on instances of quotation, in which the conventionalized name of a lexical concept is highlighted by means of quotation marks, either together with or without an additional lexical quotational marker, such as so-called, on the lexical level (cf. The so-called “vuvuzela” is an instrument from South Africa vs. The “vuvuzela” is an instrument from South Africa). The data clearly show that quotation marks are pronounced, primarily triggering a lengthening effect, independently of whether they appear together with or without a name-informing context. The results of the experiments are interpreted against the background of a pragmatic implementation of quotation marks in general as well as in spoken discourse in particular.

Natural Name Theory and Linguistic Kinds

The natural name theory, recently discussed by Johnson (2018), is proposed as an explanation of pure quotation where the quoted term(s) refers to a linguistic object such as in the sentence ‘In the above, ‘bank’ is ambiguous’. After outlining the theory, I raise a problem for the natural name theory. I argue that positing a resemblance relation between the name and the linguistic object it names does not allow us to rule out cases where the natural name fails to resemble the linguistic object it names. I argue that to avoid this problem, we can combine the natural name theory with a type-realist metaphysics of language, and hold that the name is natural because the name is an instance of the kind that it names. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of the metaphysics of language for questions in the philosophy of language.

Quotation: Compositionality and Innocence without Demonstration

We discuss two kinds of quotation, namely indirect quotation (e.g., 'Anita said that Mexico is beautiful') and pure quotation (e.g., 'Mexico' has six letters). With respect to each, we have both a negative and a positive plaint. The negative plaint is that the strict Davidsonian (1968, 1979a) treatment of indirect and pure quotation cannot be correct. The positive plaint is an alternative account of how quotation of these two sorts works.