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Accounting for non-constituents in hybrid quotations: Why unquotation is not the answer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2022

PHILIPPE DE BRABANTER Open the ORCID record for PHILIPPE DE BRABANTER [Opens in a new window]
PHILIPPE DE BRABANTER*
Affiliation:
LaDisco centre for linguistic research, Université Libre de Bruxelles, CP 175, Avenue F. Roosevelt, 50, B-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium, Philippe.De.Brabanter@ulb.be.
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Abstract

This paper addresses a serious challenge to some recent semantic accounts of quotation: the existence of ‘non-constituent hybrid quotations’, as in Vera said she was ‘very happy and incredibly relieved’ by the supreme court’s decision. These pose a threat to theories that have to make the assumption that hybrid quotations must be co-extensive with syntactic constituents. Responses to the challenge have been proposed, first a quote-breaking procedure, and subsequently unquotation. I argue that these responses fall short of providing empirically satisfactory accounts of the phenomena. Other theories of quotation are not under threat of non-constituent hybrid quotations. I single out a particular family of theories, depiction theories, which have the added advantage of doing justice to the core mechanisms at the heart of quoting.

Keywords

depictionhybrid quotationmixed quotationnon-constituentsyntactic constituentunquotation
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , February 2023 , pp. 1 - 22
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the F.R.S.-FNRS research project T.0184.16, 2016–2021. I also wish to thank the three Journal of Linguistics referees for their helpful suggestions and challenges.

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