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Did I Mention What He Said?
A familiar use of quotation within indirect discourse reports is one
that seems to indicate the very words used by the report’s subject, as in
1. Lionel said that Joseph ‘is a horse’s patoot’.
Let me introduce a bit of jargon. Suppose a speaker makes an indirect
discourse report, assertively uttering something of the form
2. X V that S,
V a “verb of saying” such as ‘says’, ‘moans’, ‘announces’, ‘whispers’, etc..
Suppose S involves quotation and the speaker’s intention in quoting is to
indicate the words X used in a speech act targeted by the report. I will then
say that the report involves indirect quotational attribution, or IQA.
It’s natural to think that when a report involves IQA, its truth turns on
whether the report’s subject actually used the quoted words. We will reject
(1) if we think Lionel didn’t use the words ‘horse’s patoot.’ It’s also natural
to think that a when a report involves IQA, it tells us what someone said.
We will after all reject (1) if we think that Lionel didn’t say that Joseph is a
horse’s patoot.
In what follows, I discuss whether reports like (1) involve use or
mention; how they do, if they do; and what gives, if they do not.
I: Quotation and Mention.
1
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There is quotation, and there is mention. When we quote, we call
attention to some aspect of linguistic form with quotation marks. When we
mention, we refer to some aspect of linguistic form via quotation. I had
always assumed that all quotation involves mention. But an interesting paper
of Francois Recanati’s made me wonder whether IQA involves mention at
all.1
Recanati argues rather plausibly that if a particular bit of quotation is a
case of mention, then, since mentioning something is referring to it, the
quotation must occur in argument position. As Recanati observes, we often
quote, as in (1), in loci which aren’t plausibly taken to be argument
positions. If we accept the idea that linguistic reference occurs only in
argument position, then whatever is going on with the quotation in (1), it
isn’t reference. And if we do take the quotation in (1) as a bit of reference,
and thus construe it as a singular term, (1) seems to be ungrammatical, since
the complement consists simply of two singular terms parked next to each
other; two singular terms double parked do not a sentence make.
One could say that (1)’s quotation does occur in argument position;
it’s just that the position is elided, unpronounced, or only explicit at the level
of logical form. One might say (1)’s utterance involves both utterance of
4. Lionel said that Joseph is a horse’s patoot,
and quotational mention of the complement’s verb phrase. Furthermore, the
latter does occur in argument position. The position is invisible because an
adjunct ‘with the words “is a horse’s patoot” ’ has been elided (and the
1
Recanati 2001. References to this paper are indicated parenthetically in the text.
2
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quotation marks displaced). Or the position is invisible because the verb
‘say’ takes two objects (a clausal complement and a linguistic argument),
and the visible occurrence of the quoted words forms part of both arguments.
On either view, (1) makes two claims, that Lionel said that Joseph is a
horse’s patoot, and that he used the words ‘is a horse’s patoot’
According to Recanati, such proposals are “convoluted and
gratuitous”, because, he says, “the form of composition they appeal to is, to
my knowledge, unheard of.’ (657) In so far as the objection is that it’s
objectionable to posit a novel, complicated mode of syntactic combination
for a problem construction, the objection isn’t that compelling. A common
account of
5. Joseph, a horse’s patoot, is coming
is that it makes two claims: that Joseph is coming and that he is a horse’s
patoot. On some accounts, this is because the subject of (5) is copied into an
argument position in the appositional phrase. On others, a two dimensional
syntactic structure, in which one term occurrence is in two argument
positions at once, is postulated2 There is nothing particularly convoluted
about such an account of apposition. The proposals about quotation that
Recanati finds “convoluted” require something similar. It’s false that they
appeal to a hietherto unheard of way of putting words together.
However, there is something ‘gratuitous’ about the proposals Recanati
criticizes. They are in part syntactic proposals, suggestions that in a
sentence like (1) a quotation occurs as an argument of a predicate. Qua
2
See McCawley 1982 and Potts 2005 for discussion of such proposals.
3
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syntactic proposal, they need to be motivated by syntactic evidence,
something that their proponents never seem to do.
II: Recanati on IQA.
Recanati denies that a use of (1) makes a single claim. He holds that,
quite generally, two claims are associated with a sentence’s use. There is a
“compositionally articulated content” –c-content, for short --whose nature is
a relatively stratightforward function of meaning. On top of this, “when a
speaker asserts something, there are often aspects of what he asserts that are
not explicitly stated but are provided by the context.” (671) An example is
provided by typical uses of
6. He took out his key and opened the door.
The claim that the key was used to open the door is presumably not part of
(6)’s meaning, for we can cancel the suggestion that the key did the work
without contradicting ourselves.
However, Recanati suggests,
From a psychological point of view, the pragmatic suggestion is
incorporated into what is asserted; a single mental representation is
constructed using both linguistic and contextual clues, rather than two
distinct representations. (672)
The picture is that from the hearer’s (and perhaps the speaker’s) perspective,
an utterance of (6) has a c-content that is in some sense “instantly” enriched
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in an interpretive process so that the utterance is understood as saying that
the relevant person took out his key and opened the door with it. What is
taken as having been asserted –the utterance’s intuitive content, or i-content
–and what in fact is asserted is this enriched claim.
What does this have to do with IQA? According to Recanati, the
meaning of the quotation marks used in IQA is simply to call attention to the
words quoted. (662-3) Quotation marks have only a pragmatic meaning that
contributes nothing to truth conditions. In (1), Recanati says, the quoted
words aren’t mentioned, they are just used, and thus (1) and
7. Lionel said that Joseph is a horse’s patoot
at the level of compositionally articulated processes –at the level of ccontent –say exactly the same thing. However, the auditor trying to
understand (1) will more or less instantly assume that the speaker is drawing
attention to words Lionel used in saying that Joseph was a horse’s patoot,
which is of course what the user expects. Because of this, the i-content of a
use of (1) is not the i-content of (7), but something along the lines of
8. Lionel said, using the phrase ‘horse’s patoot’, that Joseph is a
horse’s patoot.
I’m not convinced. I accept that what we assert can be the result of
the sort of pragmatic enrichment Recanati sketches. But when this is
plausible, we can become aware of it via cancellation. What Recanati says
about (6) is plausible because we don’t find the following bizarre:
5
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9. He took out his key and opened the door –but he didn’t use the
key; he kicked it open.
However, it’s awfully hard to make head or tail out of things like
10. Lionel said that Joseph ‘is a horse’s patoot’, but he didn’t use the
words ‘horse’s patoot’; he used ‘horse’s behind’.
Relatedly, it’s hard to believe that there is a level of semantic description
(before high-level pragmatic processes kick in) at which
11. Lionel said that Joseph is a horse’s patoot.
So, Lionel said that Joseph is a ‘horse’s patoot’
is a valid argument. But at the level of c-content (11) is valid.
One might respond that there are many levels of linguistic description
that have some sort of psychological reality but are not in any interesting
sense available to consciousness; why not say that c-content is among them?
If so, we would be unaware of the acceptability of (10) or of (11)’s validity.
I wonder whether such a response is available to Recanati. On
Recanati’s picture, c-content is perfectly assertable, and the process of
enriching it to yield i-content is optional. Why then would we be unable to
see that one option for the use of (1) is to assert what (7) says? Why does
one have no feeling that the claim that Lionel used the phrase ‘horse’s
patoot’ is an “optional addition” to what (1) says, in the way that the claim
that the key opened the door is an “optional addition” to what (6) says?
When what a sentence is typically used to say transcends what is determined
6
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by syntax and the interpretation of vocabulary, one expects this to be
obvious, or at least discernible, when it is pointed out.
In any case, there are objections to Recanati’s account that the idea –
that c-content is unavailable to consciousness --won’t defuse. Consider
13. Greenspan said that his agreement with Reich was ‘a surprise to
both of us’3,
which is a prima facie problem for Recanati. If its quoted words are used
and not mentioned, it seems that my use of (13) entails my use of
14. Greenspan said that his agreement with Reich was a surprise to
both of us.
But obviously there is no such entailment.
Discussing such examples, Recanati suggests that in some cases parts
of an uttterance are interpreted relative to a “shifted context”. In fact:
…typically…in oratio recta…when we quote an utterance, the
sentence within quotation marks is interpreted with respect to the
reported speech episode rather than the context in which the utterance
is made. …’us’ in [an example like (13)] is quoted and interpreted
with respect to the shifted context of the reported speech episode.
(679-80)
3
Cappellen and LePore 1997 and Recanati 2001 each give examples of apparently
acceptable IQA of first person speech.
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The proposal, as I understand it, is that in (13) the words ‘a surprise to both
of us’ are indeed used, but something –perhaps the speaker’s intentions –
forces them to be interpreted in a context other than the context of use.
I have two worries abut this response. First of all, it doesn’t speak to
the problem (13) poses, which is that Recanati’s view predicts that it has a
reading, given by (14), that it obviously doesn’t have. Claiming that
typically it has another reading is no help with this problem.
Secondly, the response is somewhat under-described. The original
idea was that (13) receives its c-content by being interpreted in the context
of use, after which something is “added”, yielding what is asserted. We’re
now told that a sentence with IQA may be interpreted in two contexts: one
for the material outside of quotation, the other for the quotation. This gives
us a c-content to which pragmatic processes add to get the asserted i-content.
But now consider
15. In every column he writes, the stock guru says that his current
pick will outperform ‘that dog I picked last month’.
This sentence is quite natural. It’s clear what it means: every month the
guru picks a dog, every month he says he’s doing better this time than last
month. There is no context relative to which we can interpret the quoted
words and then, by enriching the so interpreted sentence, arrive at the claim
intuitively made by the sentence. For whatever context we pick, it will
occur in a particular month. But (15) makes a claim about a collection of the
stock guru’s assertions –one (we may suppose) in January, another in
February, another in March, and so on. Of course one could claim that (15)
involved quantification over contexts, and that such quantification secured
8
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the needed variation of interpretation of the quotation. But now we are
reading syntactic structure onto (15) without any clear syntactic motivation.
The advantage Recanati’s view has over the “convoluted and gratuitous”
views of section I seems to disappear.
III: The Movement Account.
Sentences like (13) and (15) make it difficult to believe that quoted
words in IQA are used. The fact that the quotation in IQA need not occur in
argument position makes it difficult to believe that the quoted words are
mentioned. What is going on?
What are the truth conditions of a sentence like (1)? If you think that
the quoted words in these sentences aren’t used, you will probably be
sympathetic with the idea that (1) says something like
(1’) Lionel, using the words ‘is a horse’s patoot’, ascribed a property
to Joseph.
The question is how (1) could come to say this; I’ll layout, stepwise, one
possible answer.4
Step I. Take a sentence S and a context c. Remove a phrase p from S
and interpret the remaining sentence fragment in c. The interpreted
fragment determines a propositional function, f, which maps a semantic
4
The balance of this section is the account I proposed in an early (2005) version of the
present paper. The view of that paper is reported and endorsed by Cappellen and Lepore
in their 2007. As will become clear, I no longer endorse this view.
9
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value for the kind of phrase you deleted to a proposition. For example, if we
take
S: Joseph is a horse’s patoot
c: a context in which ‘Joseph’ names Joe McCarthy
p: the phrase ‘is a horse’s patoot’
then (calling the semantic values of VPs properties), removing p from S and
interpreting in c yields
f : the function that maps a property P to the proposition that
McCarthy has P.
Call the pairing, of f with p a propositional form. In our example we
generated the propositional form
PF: <f, ‘is a horse’s patoot’>.
Step II. Just as we can assert propositions, we can assert
propositional forms. Let < f, p > be a propositional form generated from the
English sentence S by deleting p and interpreting the remainder to yield the
function f. To say < f, p > is to assertively utter a sentence which contains p
and which, when p is deleted and the remainder is interpreted in the context
of utterance, yields f. If, for example, Lionel uttered ‘That guy is a horse’s
10
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patoot’, pointing at McCarthy, and names and complex demonstratives both
have their referents as semantic values, then he said FP.5
Step III. I’m sure you can see where I’m going. A not unnatural
thing to say about speech reports like (1) is that they are a means of
ascribing the assertion of a propositional form determined by the report’s
content sentence. Roughly, the form is obtained from the content sentence
by deleting its quotation, interpreting the remainder to get a propositional
function, and pairing that function with the phrase that was quoted.6 For
example, by deleting the quotation in the content sentence of
1. Lionel said that Joseph ‘is a horse’s patoot’
we generate (PF). Whether such a report is true turns on whether the
propositional form “fits” some assertive utterance of the subject of the
report. For a form <f, P> to fit an utterance of sentence S is for the phrase P
to occur in S (bearing the meaning it has as in the speech report), and for S,
once P is deleted and the remainder interpreted in the context of the reported
speech, to determine the function f.7 So, as we just saw, if Lionel uttered
‘That guy over there is a horse’s patoot’, pointing at McCarthy, then he
uttered a sentence that, when the relevant phrase is deleted and the
5
What is ‘the phrase ‘is a horse’s patoot’’? Is it individuated in terms of sound,
morphology, syntax, meaning (cum Kaplanesque character)? One or more of these? I
assume that a phrase is a syntactic entity containing vocabulary items construed as
bundles of linguistic features, including meaning cum character.
6
This account needs to be generalized to deal with cases in which the quotation in the
content sentence is discontinuous, as in ‘The candidate said that ‘tension about the
economy’ was responsible for his ‘poor showing’ in the debate’.
7
An obvious issue here concerns IQA of foreign speech, which I will discuss at the end
of the paper.
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remainder is interpreted in Lionel’s context, determines the function f. In
this case, (PF) fits an assertive utterance of Lionel’s and (1) is thus true.
Step IV. Let’s fill in some details, syntax first. In spoken language,
the sort of quotation we are looking at is indicated, as is focus, by
intonation.8 Furthermore, as with putting focus on a phrase, quoting a phrase
as we do in IQA does not change its syntactic role. For example, even after
it’s quoted, ‘is a horse’s patoot’ combines with the term ‘Joseph’ to form a
sentence. All this suggests treating the quotation in (1) as many treat focus,
as realized by an operator. Call the operator Quote. When Quote is merged
with a phrase XP the result is a new kind of an XP phrase –a QXP phrase,
call it –with the same distributional properties as, but different semantic
properties than, the original XP phrase. So to a first approximation the
syntax of ‘that Joseph ‘is a horse’s patoot’’ is
C.
[ that [ Joseph [QVP [ Quote
[VP is s horse’s patoot ]]]]]
The proposal I just outlined has the sentence (1) ascribing a relation
between Lionel and the propositional form (PF); thus in (1) the complement
clause (C) must designate or otherwise be associated with (PF). Thus the
interpretation of (C) must somehow combine the quoted phrase ‘is a horse’s
patoot’ and the function determined by ‘Joseph “is a horse’s patoot” ’ when
the quoted phrase is removed. Is there a compositional process that can
achieve this and is plausibly associated with sentences like (1)?
8
Roughly, focus is the phenomenon associated with the contrasting stresses (indicated by
capitals) in sentences like
Mary introduced JANE to two boys
Mary introduced Jane to TWO BOYS.
12
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Here’s one: if in the course of interpretation the quoted material
moves in the way a quantifier phrase does, the two elements we need to
combine will be available and (given an appropriate meaning for the Quote
operator) can combine in the way a quantifier combines with its matrix.
Here’s what I mean.
Recall that on the standard syntactic story about the phrase ‘a snake’
in ‘John saw a snake’:
(i) its semantic value is a quantifier, which is a function from
properties to truth values;
(ii) In the course of interpreting the sentence, the phrase ‘a snake’
moves from its position after the verb to a position before it: That is,
the phrase
(a) [ [ John [saw [ a snake] ]]]
turns into
(b) [ [a snake] [John [ saw [[t]]]],
where t is a trace left by the moved quantifier.
(iii) In interpretation, John saw t is interpreted as the property having
been seen by John; the quantifier a snake names the function that
maps a property P to the true iff some snake has P; and so the
sentence is true iff some snake was seen by John.
If we suppose that the QVP undergoes the same kind of movement, then in
the course of interpretation of (1) the sentence
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(a’) [ [Joseph [ Quote [ is a horse’s patoot]]]]
turns into
(b’)
[ [Quote [ is a horse’s patoot]] [ Joseph [ T]] ]
(T the trace of the moved phrase). The phrase Joseph T, as remarked above,
determines a function f from properties to propositions. Suppose Quote
names a function that maps an expression p to a function on functions:
Quote (p) applied to f yields the pair <f, p>. Then, just as the value of (b) is
the result of applying the meaning of a snake to that of John saw t, the value
of (b’) is the result of applying the meaning of Quote is a horse’s patoot to
that of Joseph T --i.e., the propositional form (PF).
Some might call the proposal that the quotation in (1) moves
“convoluted and gratuitous.” Is there evidence –for example, of multiple
readings due to (something like) scope –for such movement? Actually, there
is. Consider a use by Treasury Secretary Geithner of
16. Bernanke said that Greenspan said that his agreement with Reich
was ‘a surprise to both of us.’
This has two readings. On one, Geithner is reporting that Bernanke uttered
something along the lines of
13.
Greenspan said that his agreement with Reich was ‘a surprise to both
of us.’
14
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--i.e., he is reporting an IQA which Bernanke made to Greenspan. The
other reading is one on which Geithner is making an IQA to Bernanke. That
is, he is reporting that Bernanke uttered something along the lines of
17. Greenspan said that his agreement with Reich was a surprise to
both of us
--i.e., he is reporting that Bernanke said that Greenspan said that something
was a surprise to Bernanke and to Greenspan –and Geithner’s intention is to
attribute the quoted words to Bernanke.
If quotations are subject to the sort of movement just discussed, both
readings drop out. For there are (at least) two loci to which the quoted
material in (16) might migrate: directly below the first occurrence of ‘that’
in the sentence, and directly below the second. This means that (16) is
ambiguous, having (at least) the readings
16.1 Bernanke said that [‘a surprise to both of us’] [Greenspan said
that his agreement with Reich was …]
16.2 Bernanke said that Greenspan said that [‘a surprise to both of
us’] [his agreement with Reich was…]
(16.1) is the reading on which Geithner is IQAing Bernanke; (16.2) the
reading on which Geithner is reporting Bernanke as IQAing Greenspan.
IV: Objections to the Movement Account.
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Call the account just sketched the movement account of IQA. This
section discusses three objections to it.
Objection I. The movement account holds that the quoted material in
IQA isn’t used. But there is reason to think that it is. For example,
17. Lionel said that Joseph ‘is a horse’s patoot’.
So, Lionel said that Joseph is a horse’s patoot.
certainly has the air of a valid argument. For that matter, so does
18. Greenspan said that his agreement with Reich was ‘a surprise to
both of us.’
So, Greenspan said that his agreement with Reich was a surprise to
both of them [i.e., Greenspan and Reich].
Response. According to the movement account, (17)’s premise tells
us that Lionel said
(PF) < f, ‘is a horse’s patoot’>,
where f is the function from properties to propositions we get from ‘Joseph
“is a horse’s patoot”’ by abstracting on the phrase ‘”is a horse’s patoot”’.
This phrase contains the English words ‘is’, ‘a’, ‘horse’s’ and ‘patoot’.
Words, I take it, are bundles of linguistic features, including semantic ones.
Thus the phrase ‘is a horse’s patoot’ that occurs in (PF) has a meaning,
indeed (something like) a Kaplanesque character. But then to say PF is to
16
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ascribe a property to Joseph using a phrase with the meaning of English’s ‘is
a horse’s patoot’. One does this only if one says that Joseph is a horse’s
patoot.9 So (17) is a valid argument.
(18) is not a valid argument on the present account, but arguably this
is the right result. For arguably (18)’s premise is true if, speaking of the
surprise that he and his wife felt about his agreement with Reich, Greenspan
said ‘My agreement with Reich is a surprise to both of us.’ What is valid on
the current account is something along the lines of
18’. Greenspan said that his agreement with Reich was ‘a surprise to
both of us.’
So, Greenspan said that his agreement with Reich was a surprise to
both him and whomever else he referred to with ‘us’.
Objection II. The obvious understanding of
19. The stock guru said that his pick will outperform ‘the dog I picked
in February’. CSN’s market analyst doubts it, and so do I
is one that entails that CSN’s analyst and I doubt that the guru’s current pick
will outperform the guru’s February pick. This suggests that in (19) the first
sentence’s complement refers to “the complete content” of the guru’s
saying; the occurrence of ‘it’ in the second then also refers to this content.
But this can’t be on the movement account, since the quoted material isn’t
used.
9
I am setting issues about hyperintensionality (and tense) to the side.
17
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Discussion. The movement account doesn’t tell us what truth
conditions (19) has, since we don’t know what it is to believe or doubt a
propositional form. Perhaps the most natural thing to say is that for X to
believe or doubt < f, p > is for X to believe or doubt the result of applying f
to the interpretation of p in X’s context. But this won’t explain how my use
of (19) can say that the analyst doubts that the guru’s pick will outperform
what the guru was referring to with ‘the dog I picked in February.’ (19)’s
first conjunct says that the stock guru bears the Say relation to <f*, ‘the dog
I picked in February’>, where f* is the propositional function associated
with ‘his [=the guru’s] pick will outperform x’.10 If we treat ‘it’ as an
anaphor picking out this propositional form, ‘CSN’s stock analyst doubts it’
says that the analyst doubts that the guru’s pick will outperform the stock
that the analyst picked in February.
We could say that the relevant reading of (19) was a pragmatic matter:
uttering the first sentence of (19) makes salient the proposition the guru
would express by saying ‘my pick will outperform the dog I picked in
February.’ Once this is salient it may be assigned to ‘it’. This response isn’t
really satisfactory, though. For one thing, we will be stuck predicting that
(19) can be used to say that the analyst doubts that the guru’s pick will
outperform the analyst’s pick. But I doubt the sentence can mean this.
Furthermore, the proposal threatens to overgenerate. After all, my using
(19) also makes salient the proposition that the guru’s pick will outperform
the stock that I, Mark Richard, picked in February. But there is no
plausibility whatsoever in the idea that a use of (19) could say, inter alia,
10
It’s the function we get from the embedded sentence by abstracting on ‘the dog I
picked’, which is a function from the semantic values of quantifier phrases to
propositions.
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that CSN’s market analyst believes that the guru’s pick will outperform my
pick.
This strikes me as a real worry about the movement account.
Objection III. There are at least two sorts of cases in which the
movement the movement account requires seems impossible. First of all,
there are cases in which what’s quoted isn’t a constituent, as in the
apparently acceptable
21.
Tommy sang that he thought they were ‘alone now, the beating of a
heart’ the only sound he heard.
On no account of movement do non-constituents move.11
Secondly, in IQA expressions can be quoted in positions from which
they cannot be extracted by normal grammatical operations.12 Consider the
operation of forming a wh-question (one starting with ‘who’, ‘what’,
‘where’, etc.). This is usually understood to involve moving a wh-pronoun
from its original position to a sentence’s beginning (and inserting an
auxiliary). This process transforms (A) into (B):
11
I don’t discuss this part of objection III below. The fact that we can apparently quote
non-constituents is an argument for an account on which the quotation in IQA isn’t a
syntactic phenomenon at all, and thus provides fodder for proposals on which quotation is
to be assimilated to talking in a squeaky voice or varying the font one writes in. Clark
and Gerrig 1990 (which Recanati cites as an influence) is a well known version of such a
view.
If quotation is a syntactic phenomenon –and one might read this paper as an
attempt to spell out what we should say about it on the assumption that it is –these
examples have to be explained away. I would try to explain them as involving repeated
quotation of constituents, so that they were ‘alone now, the beating’…. is to be
understood as something like …they were ‘alone’ ‘now’, ‘the’ ‘beating’…..
12
Thanks to Ray Jackendoff for pointing this out.
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(A)
Tarski surprised Quine with what last year?
(B)
What did Tarski surprise Quine with last year?
There are limits to the positions from which such movement is possible. For
example
(C)
Tarski gave Quine the dog that destroyed what?
does not allow movement of ‘what’, as witnessed by the ungrammaticality
of:
(D)
*What did Tarski give Quine the dog that destroyed?
There are thus restrictions on what can undergo overt movment to the
top of a clause. The movement account posits covert, not overt, movement
to the top of a clause. Such movement would occur during interpretation,
and would not have an effect on how a sentence was pronounced or written.
Whatever restrictions there are on such movement, they are arguably not the
same as those on overt movement.13 Still, there certainly are restrictions on
covert movement. The quantifier at the bottom of
22. Tarski gave Quine a dog that destroyed every reprint on the table
13
Though it seems to still be a matter of controversy whether the operation posited to
move (and thus give scope to) quantifiers is subject to the same restrictions as whmovement.
20
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cannot rise to the top of the sentence, since the sentence cannot mean that for
every reprint on the table, Tarski gave Quine a dog that destroyed it. But the
movement posited by movement account, is in a sense, absolutely
unrestricted: Take any sentence S you like. It would seem that any
constituent of S can be quoted to yield a sentence S’ that can acceptably
embed below ‘Tarski said that’. On the movement account, the quoted
phrase must move to the top of the embedded clause in interpretation.
It doesn’t follow, from the fact that the quantifier ‘every reprint on the
table’ can’t move to the top of (22), that that quantifier’s quotation can’t
move to the top of the embedded sentence in
22’. Godel said that Tarski gave Quine a dog that destroyed ‘every
reprint on the table.’
But seems unlikely that the possibilities for movement vary this dramatically
between quantifiers and their quotations –especially if the quoted phrase in
(22’) is, syntactically, a quantifier. Combined with objection II, this makes
one think that we should look for another account of IQA.
V:
IQA and Events.
Whatever account we come up with, it should discern the ambiguity in
16. Bernanke said that Greenspan said that his agreement with Reich
was ‘a surprise to both of us’.
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Recall that this sentence can be understood either as purporting to
characterize the words Bernanke used, or as ascribing to Bernanke an
attempt to characterize Greenspan’s words It’s reasonable to think that
there is a syntactic reflex of this ambiguity. If the reflex is not movement,
it’s hard to imagine14 what it could be, other than an index or variable that
ties the quoted phrase to the user or to the verb used to describe the user’s
use. So let us explore that idea.
The most conservative way to develop the idea is to invoke the
common claim that quantification over events is the norm in natural
language. We can expect a sentence like (16) to involve event variables
anchored to the two occurrences of ‘say’, so that (16) says something like
16.3 For some event e: e is a saying, Bernanke was e’s agent, and
e’s object is that for some e’: e’ is a saying, Greenspan is e’ ‘s agent,
and e’ ’s object is that his agreement with Reich was ‘a surprise to
both of us.’
If one of the variables e and e’ occurs in the quotational phrase, it associates
that phrase with a particular saying. Assuming such variables occur within
quotations in IQA, we can gesture towards the forms which realize (16)’s
readings so:
16.4 Bernanke said(e) that Greenspan said that his agreement with
Reich was [‘a surprise to both of us’](e)
14
OK: it’s hard for me to imagine
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16.5 Bernanke said that Greenspan said(e) that his agreement with
Reich was [‘a surprise to both of us’](e).
Of course these are only gestures –they don’t tell us what the syntax of (16)
is supposed to be, and they don’t tell us how (16) gets its meanings. So let
me flesh things out a bit.
We now have quotations incorporating an event variable; for
definiteness, suppose that the variable is the last thing added in constructing
the quotational phrase.15 Then –returning to the simple example the paper
began with –in the sentence
1. Lionel said that Joseph ‘is a horse’s patoot’
the structure of “ ‘is a horse’s patoot’ “ is something like
Q*.
[QVP e [ Quote
[VP is a horse’s patoot ]]]
Details of the interpretation of (Q*) and of complements in which it
occurs will depend on how we understand the semantics of ‘says’ and its
complements. But however we understand these matters, one of the morals
of the last section is that in IQA a quotation needs to contribute something
that together with unquoted matierial “determines the complete content” of
what was said. Let us see how we might engineer that.
To make things simple, suppose that ‘says’ names a relation to
possible worlds propositions. Then the interpretation of (Q*) should be the
15
By which I mean it occurs as a specifier. Perhaps this is not quite where it should go:
perhaps it should be in an adjunct, and thus occur in a higher functional phrase.
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same sort of thing as the interpretation of the verb phrase ‘is a horse’s
patoot’: it should be the possible worlds version of a property, a function
from individuals to sets of worlds. Which property depends on what event e
names: If e names Lionel’s assertive utterance of ‘that guy is a horse’s
patoot’, (Q*) will pick out the property Lionel expressed therein with ‘is a
horse’s patoot.’ This is the property of being a horse’s patoot, and it’s the
right sort of thing to combine with the interpretation of the rest of the
sentence so that the complement of (1) ends up picking out the proposition
that Joesph is a horse’s patoot.
What we want to be the case in general is that
R.
Relative to an assignment f to the variables, the interpretation of
[QXP e [ Quote [XP 
]]]
(if it has one) is the interpretation of [XP  ] as it was used in f(e).
The mechanics of this are not too hard to work out. We want to interpret
structures of the (simplified) form
 QXP
T.
/
\
 Q’XP
e
/
Quote
\
XP
Quote will name a function Q that takes a phrase p as argument and returns a
(partial) function from events to interpretations –namely, interpretations that
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phrases of the type of p receive. For example, Q applied to a verb phrase,
yields a function that maps events to properties.
Exactly what function is Q(p)? Q(p) is the function that maps an
event e to the interpretation that p has as used in e, provided that e is a
saying that is realized by assertive utterance of a sentence S containing p.
(When e is not such an event, Q(p) is undefined.) In the phrase
 QVP
T1.
/
\
 Q’VP
e
/
Quote
\
VP
is a horse’s patoot
the interpretation of the node labeled Q’VP is the function that maps a
saying E to the interpretation that ‘is a horse’s patoot’ has when assertively
uttered in E. If f(e) is Lionel’s assertion involving ‘That guy is a horse’s
patoot’, the intepretation of the whole quotation will then be the
intepretation of the phrase as used in the event by Lionel. So the phrase’s
interpretation is the property of being a horse’s patoot. If that’s the
interpretation of the quotation, then the interpretation of the clause
that Joseph ‘is a horse’s patoot’
is the result of applying this property to Joseph –i.e., it’s the proposition
(cum set of worlds) that Joseph is a horse’s patoot. So (1) will be true iff
Lionel said that Joesph is a horse’s patoot, using the words ‘is a horse’s
patoot’.
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On this story we do not need to tinker with the semantics of the verb
‘say’ or invoke new technology like the propositional forms of the
movement account. A sentence written
S. x says that S
has a logical form suggested by
S’. for some e: e is a saying, x is the agent of e, and the object of e is
that S;
S / S’ is true provided that there are values for e and x that make its matrix
true. In the case in which S contains IQA, the story just told kicks in. If one
thinks through the above, one sees that in the simplest case, in which an
embedded quotation carries the event variable of the main verb of the
sentence, the truth conditions we have arrived at can be suggested as
follows.
TC.
Lionel says that S(…’T’…) is true, relative to a context c iff there is a
saying e with Lionel as its agent whose object is the interpretation of that
S(…T…) when T therein is interpreted as it is in e and the rest of the clause is
interpreted as it is in c.
VI: Concluding Remarks.
Are the words in quotations like that in
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23.
Madoff said that his imprisonment was ‘a surprise to me’
being used? I wouldn’t have thought so. Certainly on the current account
my use of (23) cannot ascribe to Madoff a thought about me –unless Madoff
has figured out a way to refer to Mark Richard by using the word ‘me’. Are
the quoted words in (23) mentioned? I don’t think so, since I don’t see that
we have much reason to say that they occur in an argument position. Their
position is, let us say, marked for a special interpretation, one associated
with the marker –that is, the event variable commanding them. But that
doesn’t mean that the quotation is an argument. The expressions in IQA
aren’t used in the philosopher’s sense, and they aren’t mentioned. They are
interpreted, in a slightly unusual but perfectly systematic way.
So far as I can see, the suggestion just made straightforwardly
accounts for the data we have been accumulating in the course of the
discussion. There is, however an objection: the account assumes that when
we say something using IQA, what’s said is true only if the report’s subject
used the quoted words. But, the objection goes, obviously that’s wrong. If
Henri uttered ‘on dit que le film Wall Street est tres, tres bon’, I can correctly
report
24. Henri said that people say that the film Wall Street is ‘very, very
good.’16
Here is how I think we should respond to this worry.
16
Something similar occurs with (for example) English reports of sayings carried out in
English –we certainly correct for grammatical mistakes in such reports. I think what I’m
about to say can be applied to such cases but I won’t try to spell out details here.
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Suppose that when people learn how to use quotation in reporting the
speech of others, they learn a rule that assigns the truth conditions sketched
in the last section. Suppose that having thus learned to interpret things like
(1) and (24), one wants to convey both what Henri said and that he used a
conventional translation of ‘very, very good.’. What will one do? Isn’t it
obvious? According to the rule one learned, and speaking a bit sloppily, the
interpretation of (24) is something like
24.1 For some saying e: Henri is the agent of e and the object of e is
that people say that the movie Wall Street is ‘very, very good’,
interpreted as in e.
What one wants to convey is
24.2 For some saying e: Henri is the agent of e and the object of e is
that people say that the movie Wall Street is ‘very, very good’,
interpreted as its translation in e.
One will of course use (24) to convey (24.2), knowing the hearer will use the
established procedure to interpret (24) but will, if he knows the speech was
in another tongue, guess correctly it’s a translation of the quoted words that
is at issue. The upshot is that if the foregoing is a correct account of how we
learn to interpret IQA, one expects we would develop something like the
practice we have developed for using IQA to report foreign assertion. So the
fact that we talk the way we do doesn’t count against the account.17
17
Obviously I’m using a style of argument due to Kripke.
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Does this mean that a use of (24) in the imagined circumstances is not
strictly speaking true? Or does it mean that the press of usage makes a
generalization of the last section the correct account of the truth conditions
of IQA in mature? I don’t know. Does it matter?18
Mark Richard
Philosophy
Tufts University
Mark.Richard@Tufts.edu
Cappelen, Herman and Lepore, Ernest. 1997. ‘Varieties of Quotation’. Mind
106, 429-50.
Cappelen, Herman and Lepore, Ernest. 2007. Language Turned on Itself.
Oxford University Press.
Clark, Herb and Gerrig, R. 1990. ‘Quotations as Demonstrations’.
Language 66, 764-805.
McCawley, James. 1982. ‘Parentheticals and Discontnuous Structure’.
Linguistic Inquiry 13, 91-206.
18
Thanks to Sam Cummings, Herman Cappellen, Ray Jackendoff, Ernie Lepore, and
Francois Recanati for comments; David Braun, Graeme Forbes and Eric Swanson for
judgments about readings; and Michael Glanzberg for advice about focus.
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Potts, Christopher. 2005. The Logic of Conversational Implicatures. Oxford
University Press.
Recanati, Francois. 2001. ‘Open Quotation’. Mind 110, 637-87.
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