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,
, 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.
This paper looks into the category membership of colour words that enter into combination with modifiers like bright, dark, light, or pale. The English grammatical literature usually assumes that ...these ‘composite colour strings’, used attributively or predicatively, form adjective-adjective compounds. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals difficulties with this view. First, it is unusual for adjectives to modify adjectives. Second, even if they are compounds, it is unusual for their comparative and superlative inflections to be marked not on the head of the structure, but internally on the modifier, as in brighter red. These difficulties lead us to question the compoundhood of those strings, but also to explore the possibility that, at least in some predicative and attributive uses, the colour words in them are nouns. Using data from the BNC and COCA, we test our intuitions and those found in the literature. We conclude that the adjective-adjective compound analysis of composite colour strings cannot be generalised to all predicative and attributive uses. In at least some of those, the colour word is a noun. In some other cases, it may not be possible to decide if the colour word is a noun or an adjective.
In this paper, I offer an analysis of a type of hybrid (including ‘mixed’, or ‘double-duty’) quotation that contains expressions indexed to a deictic centre distinct from the speaker of the host ...sentence, as in Trump insisted there was “zero chance I’ll quit”. Most writers on quotation offer a semantic account of hybrid quotation, in terms of the conventional meaning of some linguistic unit that occurs as part of the construction, usually quotation marks. Against these, and with Recanati (2000, 2001), I provide an analysis in terms of context-shifts. Understood in a broad sense, context can shift along several parameters: language, situation of utterance, circumstance of evaluation. I show that what is required in the case at hand is a situation-shift, and suggest how that shift can be articulated with other shifts. Relying on Clark & Gerrig (1990) and Clark (1996), I also show that shifts are selective and can therefore be partial. This further allows me to account for those less common hybrid quotations in which indexicals are indexed to the reporting context. All in all, my account points towards the viability of a pragmatic theory that views quotation as being a non-conventional, depictive act of communication, typically different from ordinary linguistic acts, the nature of which is essentially conventional.
A highly emblematic paradigm in experimental pragmatics consists in presenting participants with an existentially quantified sentence of the form Some X are Y in a context in which all X are ...obviously Y. Participants who reject such sentences as false or infelicitous are said to adopt a ‘pragmatic’ instead of a ‘logical’ reading of some, and to derive the scalar implicature Some, but not all X are Y. Although there are several competing accounts of scalar implicatures, virtually all of them assume that a participant who responds pragmatically to an under-informative some-sentence mentally entertains a linguistic representation of the negation of a stronger alternative (All X are Y). Yet, there is no evidence that judging an under-informative some-sentence false or infelicitous actually involves the derivation of the some, but not all scalar implicature. We report three experiments consisting of a sentence-picture verification task followed by a forced choice between two paraphrases of the sentence initially assessed. These experiments robustly show that hearers who reject an under-informative some-sentence do so without explicitly entertaining a some, but not all implicature. Our results represent a strong challenge for grammatical accounts of scalar implicature, which all presuppose a mechanism of negation of stronger alternatives, and force a drastic reinterpretation of processing data on scalar implicatures. More generally, our findings show that one should not conflate psychological models of pragmatic processing with a reconstructed link between sentences and their potential meanings.
•Traditional studies on scalar implicatures assume the Explicit Derivation Hypothesis.•This hypothesis is that pragmatic responses correspond to scalar implicatures.•In Phase 1, we use the same tasks that routinely feature in the relevant literature.•But, additionally, in Phase 2 we prompt participants to reflect on their judgement.•There is no congruence between pragmatic responses and implicature derivation.•A central assumption of experimental pragmatics lacks empirical grounds.
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are often said to present a global pragmatic impairment. However, there is some observational evidence that context-based comprehension of indirect requests may ...be preserved in autism. In order to provide experimental confirmation to this hypothesis, indirect speech act comprehension was tested in a group of 15 children with autism between 7 and 12 years and a group of 20 typically developing children between 2:7 and 3:6 years. The aim of the study was to determine whether children with autism can display genuinely contextual understanding of indirect requests. The experiment consisted of a three-pronged semi-structured task involving Mr Potato Head. In the first phase a declarative sentence was uttered by one adult as an instruction to put a garment on a Mr Potato Head toy; in the second the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by another speaker; in the third phase the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by the first speaker. Children with autism complied with the indirect request in the first phase and demonstrated the capacity to inhibit the directive interpretation in phases 2 and 3. TD children had some difficulty in understanding the indirect instruction in phase 1. These results call for a more nuanced view of pragmatic dysfunction in autism.
We argue for an intimate relation between semantic externalism and semantic deference and propose a typology of speakers’ metasemantic views as revealed by their deferential attitudes. Building on ...this typology, we then offer a classification of metasemantic disagreements understood as verbal disputes between speakers who (consciously or unconsciously) hold divergent metasemantic views about the same word. In particular, we distinguish lower-order metasemantic disagreements between speakers who disagree on the exact source of meaning determination for a word yet agree on the kind of deferential attitude this word is liable to, from higher-order metasemantic disagreements between speakers who do not even agree on the suitable kind of deferential attitude. We demonstrate the fruitfulness of our classification through the concrete implications it has for conceptual engineering.
Utterers make commitments, for example when they produce Direct Discourse reports. Do the words chosen to frame a quotation affect those commitments, as has been argued by several authors (e.g. ...Romaine and Lange, 1991; Buchstaller, 2014)? In particular, do users of ‘old’ and ‘new’ quotatives (e.g. dire and genre) make different commitments vis-à-vis the object of their report, the degree of faithfulness of that report, the depiction of additional nonverbal aspects? Within a framework rooted in Clark and Gerrig’s (1990) theory of quotations as demonstrations, and on the basis of diverse data sources, this paper shows that the commitments which are inherent in the act of quotation take precedence over those that result from the choice of a quotative expression.
•This paper teases apart utterer commitments when producing Direct Discourse.•Such commitments are assessed against a general theory of quotation.•Assessment of this sort is routinely neglected in the literature on quotatives.•’Depiction’ theory is argued to provide the most appropriate framework.•It posits a central pragmatic commitment to selective aspects of a targeted behavior.•Lexical commitments derive from the choice of a quotative expression.•Pragmatic commitment inherent in quoting act trumps the lexical commitments.•Hypotheses are tested on a corpus of occurrences of DD in French.
Reconciles armchair theorising about the semantics-pragmatics interface with hypotheses about cognitive architecture. This book concerns with the cognitive counterparts of lexical meanings. It also ...explores the links between moods and forces. It looks at the epistemological status of semantic theory from the point of view of human psychology.
This study examines a type of quotation –‘hybrid quotations’– that has received quite a bit of attention from philosophers, semanticists and pragmaticists over the last dozen years or so. Theoretical ...debates have centred on the question whether the contribution to content of such quotations is semantic in essence, or pragmatic. After presenting prototypical examples of ‘mixed quotation’ and ‘scare quoting’, the two subtypes of hybrid quotations usually distinguished by specialists, I outline the two main ways of approaching them – as semantic or pragmatic phenomena – and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. After that, I present several empirical facts that may help one to decide which sort of theory is more likely to prevail eventually. In the process, the reader can get acquainted with some of the remarkable variety that hybrid quotation offers.
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