The pragmatics of quotation, explicatures and modularity of mind

This paper presents a purely pragmatic account of quotation which, it is argued, will be able to accommodate all relevant linguistic phenomena. Given that it is more parsimonious to explain the data by reference to pragmatic principles only than to explain them by reference to both pragmatic and semantic principles, as is common in the literature, I conclude that the account of quotation I present is to be preferred to the more standard accounts (including the alternative theories of quotation, discussed here). Keywords: theories of quotation, pragmatics, explicatures, cancellability, modularity of mind, modularity and pragmatics, parsimony, language games Introduction In the following, I present a purely pragmatic account of quotation and argue that it is able to accommodate all relevant linguistic phenomena. The paper has the following structure: In Section 1, I address, in a general way, the problems which a pragmatic theory of quotation must tackle: the asymmetry between written and oral language; the possibility of quoting a sentence originally uttered in a different language; the fact that in the oral language there is nothing that can be demonstrated using demonstrative pronouns; the fact that we can master quotation practices in languages different from our own; and the fact that we can learn quotation practices without formal instruction. In Section 2, I discuss the standard theories of quotation (including some older ones, like the demonstrative theory). Following a discussion of the disadvantages of these theories, I focus on Recanati’s theory, which opens the way to a radical pragmatic perspective. I also consider the case of ‘mixed quotation’ and propose that pragmatic intrusion can happily deal with it. Pragmatics and