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Levels of Linguistic Acts and the Semantics of Quotation
Quotation constitutes a major challenge for standard formal semantics, in particular by
asking for a unified account of pure (1a), direct (1b), and mixed (1c) quotation as below:
(1) a. John whispered ‘hey’.
b. John said 'I will come'.
c. John said that the paper is 'terrific'.
The standard view is that pure quotations are expression-referring terms, managing, in some
nonstandard way, to refer to the expression type as which they appear. Direct quotations on
the standard view require a very different treatment since they contribute both a content (a
proposition) and a form and thus cannot just act as expression-referring terms. Also mixed
quotations contribute a content and a form, though the latter may either characterize the
reported speech act as in (1c) or some contextually given speech act. The standard view tends
to consider both direct and mixed quotation pragmatic phenomena quite distinct from pure
quotation. The standard view generally admits that quotation of various sorts cannot be
treated compositionally and be based on the interpretation of a formal structure.
The difficulty with quotation has to do with a fundamental assumption of standard
semantics, namely the view that the meanings of sentences are abstract propositions. This
view has recently been challenged (for reasons not having to do with quotation) by
philosophers such as Soames (2010) and Hanks (2007, 2011). Soames and Hanks argue that
abstract propositions should be replaced by (types of) cognitive acts (such as acts of
predicating a property of objects). The present paper will apply an act-based conception of
sentence meaning to quotation, arguing that this allows for a unified and compositional
account of different types of quotation. In contrast to Soames and Hanks, however, the present
paper does not take (types of) cognitive acts to play the role of propositions. Instead it will
follow Twardowksi (1912) in taking the products of such acts to play that role, entities of the
sort of assertions or judgments (rather than acts of asserting or judging) (Moltmann 2014, to
appear). According to that view, it is not the act of asserting that is a truth bearer, but the
(non-enduring) product of such an act, the 'assertion'. An attitude report such as (2a) then has
the logical form in (2b), where say takes implicit Davidsonian events as arguments (acts of
thinking) and product is a function mapping an act onto its product:
(2) a. John said that Mary is happy.
b. e(say(e, John) & [that Mary is happy](product(e))
Here [that Mary is happy] is taken to be a property of 'locutionary products' (or perhaps
illocutionary products), giving their truth conditions and perhaps specifying their composition
in terms of smaller products, say products of rhetic acts.
Following Ingarden (1931), the notion of a product (as opposed to an act) will be extended
to other levels of language, by identifying phonological, morphological and syntactic units
with kinds of products of phatic acts (or ‘tokens’).
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The act-based semantic account of quotation developed in this paper makes crucial use of
Austin’s (1962) distinction among linguistic acts of increasingly higher levels: phonetic acts
(the uttering of sounds) - phatic acts (the uttering of sounds as belonging to phonological,
morphological, or syntactic categories) - rhetic acts (utterances for the purpose of conveying
conceptual or referential meaning) - locutionary acts (utterances for the purpose of conveying
a propositional content) - illocutionary acts (making assertions, demands etc). Ordinarily,
such acts are ordered by Goldmann's (1970) ‘by’-relation. The crucial idea is that with
quotation lower-level linguistic acts are performed not or not just in order to perform higherlevel linguistic acts, but contribute directly to the compositional semantics of the sentence.
This then yields the following account of direct quotation as in (1b). The product of the
act of saying described in (1b) (the event argument of said) will be a complex product
consisting of a phatic product and an (il)locutionary product. The direct quotation ‘I will
come’ in (1b) will express a property of such complex products characterizing both the part
that is the phatic product and the part that is the illocutionary product. The logical form of
(1b) will thus be just like (2b), the difference being only that (1b) involves a more complex
product (of an act of saying) as well as a more complex product property, expressed by ‘I will
come’.
The act-based account of quotation will go along will a particular view of the formal
structure of quotational sentences and their compositional semantics. The property of phatic
products conveyed by a direct quotation will be based on a lower-level linguistic structure that
will be considered part of the syntactic structure that is input to semantic interpretation, for
example a phonological or mropholigical structure. That is, a direct quotation will have an
ordinary syntactic structure as well as, say, a phonological structure as input to semantic
interpretation. The interpretation of the two structures will result in a property that
characterizes complex products that have both a phatic and an (il)locutionary component.
Unlike in standard formal semantics, the act-based conception of meaning permits an
interpretation of a phonological structure as part of the input to semantic interpretation,
namely as a phatic product type. This enables a compositional treatment of quotation based
strictly on formal structure.
The same sort of account applies to mixed quotation as in (1c), but only with respect to a
part of the clause, the quoted part (‘terrific’). Moreover, with mixed quotation the phatic
product type interpreting the quoted expression may serve to characterize an utterance (part)
that belongs to the nonlinguistic context.
Pure quotations as in (1a) have only a lower-level linguistic structure and thus do not
contribute the usual sort of semantic value to the meaning of the sentence. Thus, hey in (1a)
will just be interpreted as a phatic product type on the basis, say, of a phonological structure.
This product type in turn will serve to characterize the (phatic) product of the event of
whispering described by the verb.
References
Austin, (1962): How to do Things with Words?. Harvard University Press.
Goldmann, A. (1970): A Theory of Human Action. Princeton UP, Princeton.
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Hanks, P. W. (2007): ‘The Content-Force Distinction’. Philosophical Studies 134, 141-164.
---------------- (2011): ‘Propositions as Types’. Mind 120, 11-52.
Moltmann, F. (2014): ‘Propositions, Attitudinal Objects, and the Distinction between
Actions and Products’. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (5-6), special issue
on propositions, edited by G. Rattan and D. Hunter, 679-701.
Moltmann, F. (to appear): Cognitive Products and the Semantics of Attitude Verbs and
Deontic Modals’. In F. Moltmann / M. Textor (eds.): Act-Based Conceptions of
Propositional Content. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. Oxford UP.
Ingarden R. (1931): Das Literarische Kunstwerk. Niemeyer, Halle. (’The Literary Work of
Art’)
Soames, S. (2010): What is Meaning? Princeton: Princeton UP.
Twardowski, K. (1912): ‘Actions and Products. Some Remarks on the Borderline of
Psychology, Grammar, and Logic’. In J. Brandl / J. Wolenski, eds.: Kazimierz
Twardowski. On Actions, Products, and Other Topics in the Philosophy.
Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999, 103-132.