Quotation marks as monsters, or the other way around?

Abstract

Mixed quotation exhibits characteristics of both mention and use. Some even go so far as to claim it can be described wholly in terms of the pragmatics of language use. Thus, it may be argued that the observed shifting of indexicals under all quotation shows that a monstrous operator is involved. I will argue the opposite: a proper semantic account of quotation can be used to exorcize Schlenker’s monsters from semantic theory. Natural languages provide various, more or less opaque, ways to report another person’s speech act. The extremes on the opacity-transparancy scale are direct and indirect discourse. Direct discourse is most faithful to the original utterance, (1a), while an indirect discourse report preserves only the proposition originally expressed, typically adapting various words in the process, (1b):

(1) a. Bush said: “The terrorists misunderestimated me”

b. Bush said that the terrorists underestimated him

A third, and very common way to report something like this slip of the tongue is mixed quotation, i.e. an indirect report of which certain parts are quoted verbatim: (2) Bush said the terrorists “misunderestimated me” In this paper I develop a semantics of (mixed) quotation and show how it can be used to analyze shifted indexicality.