Sezai Karakoç, who is a one of the most important poets and thinkers of the last period, developed an ideal by adapting the concept of resurrection in the creed to the resurrection in the world. His ideal of Seeing it as reviving the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad, Karakoç defined his cause as his cause. Prophet Muhammad, who has no direct relation to the knowledge of Hadith, but to the center of the world of thought. Karakoç, who put the Prophet (...) as a “measure” and “principle” or “blessed word” in some of his works, has made quotations that we can collect under headings such as the search for truth, the importance of knowledge, good morals, the battle with the soul, preparation for death and zuhd, without referring to anyone. The extent to which such transfers of uncertain affiliation take place in the hadith sources or to what extent they are related to hadiths has aroused our curiosity. We aimed to determine the place in hadith sources and their value in terms of hadith science, which Karakoç accepted as a "holy word" or as a rule and mentioned them in quotation marks without attributing them to anyone. Within the scope of this study; We aimed to deal with the sources, authenticity, context and interpretations of the rumors. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines an oddity that has gone unnoticed since Nietzsche first pointed it out to his friend and confidant Erwin Rohde in 1872—namely, that Wilamowitz, in his attack on The Birth of Tragedy, systematically misquotes Nietzsche. A large number of the quotations from The Birth of Tragedy by Wilamowitz in both installments of Zukunftsphilologie! are pseudo-quotations—whether they are off by a word or more or whether they are a collage of phrases drawn freely from Nietzsche's vocabulary. This essay (...) revisits the debate from the angle of nineteenth-century philology in its relation to textual authority. A complete appendix of Wilamowitz's misquotations from The Birth of Tragedy and from Rohde's Afterphilologie lays out, for the first time, this evidence of the practices of the first Nietzschean philologist in history, Wilamowitz himself. (shrink)

A popular book on semantics, illustrating and commenting on uses of symbols in the social and physical sciences. The author writes best when he deals with subtle uses of language in practical affairs and in politics, but in clarifying notions central to semantics he is too often imprecise and obscure. His selection of quotations and references suggests, furthermore, that he is unacquainted with much of the best recent work in semantics.--I. C. L.

This paper describes the significance of key empirical findings from the recent and landmark study Caring and Aging with Pride: The National Health, Aging and Sexuality Study (with Karen I. Fredriksen‐Goldsen as the principal investigator), on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender aging and health disparities. We will illustrate these findings with select quotations from study participants and show how nonconscious bias (i.e., activation of negative stereotypes outside conscious awareness) in the clinical encounter and health care setting can threaten shared decision‐making (...) and perpetuate health disparities among LGBT older adults. We recognize that clinical ethicists are not immune from nonconscious bias but maintain that they are well situated to recognize bias and resulting injustice by virtue of their training. Further, we discuss how clinical ethicists can influence the organization's ethical culture and environment to improve the quality and acceptability of health care for LGBT older adults. (shrink)

Concern is growing as research continues to find evidence of academic misconduct among medical students. There is, however, paucity of information on this issue among medical students and medical graduates in Africa. We determined the perceptions and attitude of house officers on academic misconduct within Nigerian medical schools. We conducted 7 focus group discussions among pre-registration house-officers working in a Nigerian Teaching hospital between October and November 2013. A FGD guide containing 7 broad questions related to their perception and attitude (...) on academic misconduct was employed. Ethnographic content analysis and manual coding were adopted in identifying themes, issues and representative quotations. A total of 58 participants out of an eligible pool of 76 PRHOs were recruited. All the groups associated academic misconduct chiefly with cheating in examinations, and perceived it as a commonplace problem. “It is a part of school life”, admitted one PRHO. Copying during exam appeared to be the commonest form of cheating. Another respondent opined that “The lecturers should be more concerned with helping students understand better. They should not make passing an exam a do-or-die affair.” The perception and attitudes towards academic misconduct may be a reflection of the prevailing moral decline in the contemporary Nigerian society. Underlying the reasons adduced by the participants for getting involved in academic misconduct is the fear of failure in examinations. Apart from consolidating formal and informal medical ethics education, the medical schools should ensure that the opportunities and pressures to indulge in academic misconduct are minimized. (shrink)

I argue that free indirect discourse should be analyzed as a species of direct discourse rather than indirect discourse. More specifically, I argue against the emerging consensus among semanticists, who analyze it in terms of context shifting. Instead, I apply the semantic mechanisms of mixed quotation and unquotation to offer an alternative analysis where free indirect discourse is essentially a quotation of an utterance or thought, but with unquoted tenses and pronouns.

Pure quotation, as in ‘cat’ has three letters, is a linguistic device designed for referring to linguistic expressions. I present a uniform recon struction of the four classic philosophical accounts of the phenomenon: the proper name theory, the description theory, the demonstrative theory, and the disquotational theory. I evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each proposal with respect to fundamental semantic properties like compositionality, productivity, and recursivity.

A common framing has it that any adequate treatment of quotation has to abandon one of the following three principles: (i) The quoted expression is a syntactic constituent of the quote phrase; (ii) If two expressions are derived by applying the same syntactic rule to a sequence of synonymous expressions, then they are synonymous; (iii) The language contains synonymous but distinct expressions. In the following, a formal syntax and semantics will be provided for a quotational language which adheres to (...) all three principles. The point here is not merely to provide a “possibility proof”, but to reveal the hard constraints on the theory of quotation, and to highlight certain assumptions at the syntax/semantics/post-semantics interfaces. (shrink)

This article explores the discursive uses of a self-quotation in adolescent talk. The self-quotation uses the quotative marker be + like to convey or project bold statements as part of a larger narrative. We will demonstrate how the preface leading up to the self-quotation is designed as hard to counter, and instructs the hearer how to understand what comes next. The self-quotation, on the other hand, constitutes the assessment as a `mere characterization' that provides the speaker (...) with a number of opportunities for testing the proposed view. Speakers are thus able to bolster potentially controversial views against refutation while also giving them a preliminary status. These features make for an interesting conversational resource that enables speakers and recipients to engage in a collaborative process of putting potentially bold statements to the test. (shrink)

This article deals with quotatives–overt marks that indicate quotations–consisting in iti/ti or containing vuttaṃ which are used in Pāli commentarial literature to signal the occurrence of a quotation. We distinguish two types, namely, “general quotatives” and “individual quotatives”. The former are universally valid. They are widely acknowledged and used in various text corpora over several centuries. The latter are defined by an author solely for usage in his commentary. In the first part of our contribution we describe the implications (...) connected with the usage of quotatives, and depict the specific problems which may arise when a text including “individual quotatives” is tacitly borrowed. In the second part we present some of the most common “general quotatives” formed with the words iti/ti and vuttaṃ. We aim at pointing out in which text layers a quotative is applied, for which text layers it is used, when it was in and when out of fashion. (shrink)

The phenomenon of mixed quotation exhibits clear signs of both the apparent transparency of compositional language use and the opacity of pure quotation. I argue that the interpretation of a mixed quotation in- volves the resolution of a metalinguistic presupposition. The leading idea behind my proposal is that a mixed-quoted expression, say, “has an anomalous feature”, means what x referred to with the words ‘has an anomalous feature’. To understand how this solves the paradox, I set up (...) a precise grammatical framework, explicitly connecting various levels of linguistic analysis: phonological forms, categorial syntax, and a dynamic picture of the semantics–pragmatics interface. In this framework I formalize and evaluate a presuppositional account of mixed quotation. Finally, I address the phenomenon of unquotation and argue that it is an essential ingredient for empirically adequate analysis of mixed quotation in natural language. (shrink)

Sometimes form-meaning mappings in language are not arbitrary, but iconic: they depict what they represent. Incorporating iconic elements of language into a compositional semantics faces a number of challenges in formal frameworks as evidenced by the lengthy literature in linguistics and philosophy on quotation/direct speech, which iconically portrays the words of another in the form that they were used. This paper compares the well-studied type of iconicity found with verbs of quotation with another form of iconicity common in (...) sign languages: classifier predicates. I argue that these two types of verbal iconicity can, and should, incorporate their iconic elements in the same way using event modification via the notion of a context dependent demonstration. This unified formal account of quotation and classifier predicates predicts that a language might use the same strategy for conveying both, and I argue that this is the case with role shift in American Sign Language. Role shift is used to report others’ language and thoughts as well as their actions, and recently has been argued to provide evidence in favor of Kaplanian “monstrous” indexical expressions. By reimagining role shift as involving either quotation for language demonstrations or “body classifier” predicates for action demonstrations, the proposed account eliminates one major argument for these monsters coming from sign languages. Throughout this paper, sign languages provide a fruitful perspective for studying quotation and other forms of iconicity in natural language due to their lack of a commonly used writing system which is otherwise often mistaken as primary data instead of speech, the rich existing literature on iconicity within sign language linguistics, and the ability of role shift to overtly mark the scope of a language report. In this view, written language is merely a special case of a more general phenomenon of sign and speech demonstration, which accounts more accurately for natural language data by permitting more strict or loose verbatim interpretations of demonstrations through the context dependent pragmatics. (shrink)

After the Turks met with Islam, their interest in religious texts continued in both scientific and literary fields. Many people who came to Anatolian lands brought with them the culture, literature and customs of the geography they lived in before and brought an understanding that we can conceptualize as Anatolian Irfān. One of those who served this purpose is undoubtedly Mawlānā. Mawlânâ, who influenced the geog-raphy he lived in with both conversation and letters especially poetry, used many texts that he (...) thought belonged to the Prophet as hadith in his works. In this article, the hadith texts that Mawlānā used by way of quotation or reference -both fully and partially- in his work called Divān-i Kabīr were examined. While the sources and soundness of the narrations included in the quotation method are mentioned in the study, the results of Takhrīj information of the hadiths cited with inreference are reflected. Mawlânâ’s hadith usage method was evaluated specific to an ghazal, that he fictionalized with Quranic verses and hadiths, the consequences obtained were analyzed and the narrations are classified contextually. The extent to which the author’s connection with Sufism is effective in the choice of narration has been analyzed around the results obtained. (shrink)

Due to their reliance on constitutive higher-order representing to generate the qualities of which the subject is consciously aware, I argue that the major existing higher-order representational theories of consciousness insulate us from our first-order sensory states. In fact on these views we are never properly conscious of our sensory states at all. In their place I offer a new higher-order theory of consciousness, with a view to making us suitably intimate with our sensory states in experience. This theory relies (...) on the idea of ‘quoting’ sensory qualities, so is dubbed the ‘quotational higher-order thought theory’. I argue that it can capture something of the idea that we are ‘acquainted’ with our conscious states without slipping beyond the pale for naturalists, whilst also providing satisfying treatments of traditional problems for higher-order theories concerning representational mismatch. The theory achieves this by abandoning a representational mechanism for mental intentionality, in favour of one based on ‘embedding’. (shrink)

Quotation exhibits characteristics of both use and mention. I argue against the recently popular pragmatic reductions of quotation to mere language use (Recanati 2001), and in favor of a truly hybrid account synthesizing and extending Potts (2007) and Geurts and Maier (2005), using a mention logic and a dynamic semantics with presupposition to establish a context-driven meaning shift. The main advantages are an account of error neutralization and shifted indexicality under quotation. The current paper addresses the problematic (...) data involving quoted non-constituents. (shrink)

I argue that indirect quotation in the first person simple present tense (self-quotation) provides a class of infallible assertions. The defense of this conclusion examines the joint descriptive and constitutive functions of performative utterances and argues that a parallel treatment of belief ascription is in order. The parallel account yields a class of infallible belief ascriptions that makes no appeal to privileged modes of access. Confronting a dilemma formulated by Crispin Wright for theories of self-knowledge gives an epistemological (...) setting for the account of infallible belief ascription. (shrink)

The issues addressed in philosophical papers on quotation generally concern only a particular type of quotation, which I call ‘closed quotation’. The other main type, ‘open quotation’, is ignored, and this neglect leads to bad theorizing. Not only is a general theory of quotation out of reach: the specific phenomenon of closed quotation itself cannot be properly understood if it is not appropriately situated within the kind to which it belongs. Once the distinction between (...) open and closed quotation has been drawn and properly appreciated, it is tempting to consider that only closed quotation is relevant to semantics. Open quotation is more a matter of pragmatics: it is a matter of what people do with words, rather than a matter of content and truth-conditions. In this way one can provide the beginning of a justification for the neglect of open quotation in current semantic theorizing. There is some truth in this view, yet the phenomenon of ‘mixed quotation’, investigated at length in this paper, is interesting precisely because it shows that things are not so simple. Important issues concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics will thus be raised. (shrink)

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.

In his paper “Quotation”, Donald Davidson contrasts three theories about how quotation marks do their work, that is, about how tokens like this one: "sheep” refer to the type of which the following is a token: sheep. He rejects the “proper name” and “spelling” theories, and propounds and defends a new account of quotation which he calls the “demonstrative theory”. I shall argue that the truth about how quotation works has points of resemblance with both the (...) spelling and demonstrative theories, though it is not a mere combination of elements from those two. It is closer to Davidson’s theory than to the other, and I have reached it by developing the pioneering start that he provided. (shrink)

Due to their reliance on constitutive higher-order representing to generate the qualities of which the subject is consciously aware, I argue that the major existing higher-order representational theories of consciousness insulate us from our first-order sensory states. In fact on these views we are never properly conscious of our sensory states at all. In their place I offer a new higher-order theory of consciousness, with a view to making us suitably intimate with our sensory states in experience. This theory relies (...) on the idea of ‘quoting’ sensory qualities, so is dubbed the ‘quotational higher-order thought theory’. I argue that it can capture something of the idea that we are ‘acquainted’ with our conscious states without slipping beyond the pale for naturalists, whilst also providing satisfying treatments of traditional problems for higher-order theories concerning representational mismatch. The theory achieves this by abandoning a representational mechanism for mental intentionality, in favour of one based on ‘embedding’. (shrink)

The issues addressed in philosophical papers on quotation generally concern only a particular type of quotation, which I call 'closed quotation'. The other main type, 'open quotation', is ignored, and this neglect leads to bad theorizing. Not only is a general theory of quotation out of reach: the specific phenomenon of closed quotation itself cannot be properly understood if it is not appropriately situated within the kind to which it belongs. Once the distinction between (...) open and closed quotation has been drawn and properly appreciated, it is tempting to consider that only closed quotation is relevant to semantics. Open quotation is more a matter of pragmatics: it is a matter of what people do with words, rather than a matter of content and truth-conditions. In this way one can provide the beginning of a justification for the neglect of open quotation in current semantic theorizing. There is some truth in this view, yet the phenomenon of 'mixed quotation', investigated at length in this paper, is interesting precisely because it shows that things are not so simple. Important issues concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics will thus be raised. (shrink)

Starting with Frege, the semantics (and pragmatics) of quotation has received a steady flow of attention over the last one hundred years. It has not, however, been subject to the same kind of intense debate and scrutiny as, for example, both the semantics of definite descriptions and propositional attitude verbs. Many philosophers probably share Davidson's experience: ‘When I was initiated into the mysteries of logic and semantics, quotation was usually introduced as a somewhat shady device, and the introduction (...) was accompanied by a stern sermon on the sin of confusing the use and mention of expressions’ (Davidson 1979, p. 79). Those who leave it at that, however, miss out on one of the most difficult and interesting topics in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Quotation exhibits characteristics of both use and mention. I argue against the recently popular pragmatic reductions of quotation to mere language use (e.g. Recanati 2001), and in favor of a truly hybrid account synthesizing and extending Potts (2007) and Geurts & Maier (2005), using a mention logic and a dynamic semantics with presupposition to establish a context-driven meaning shift. The current paper explores a `quotebreaking' extension to solve the problems posed by non-constituent quotation, and anaphora, ellipsis and (...) quantifier raising across quotation marks. (shrink)

In a paper published recently in the Journal of Philosophy, Mario Gómez-Torrente provides a methodological argument for the “disquotational,” Tarski-inspired theory of pure quotation. Gómez-Torrente’s previous work has greatly contributed to making this theory perhaps the most widely supported view of pure quotation in recent years, against all other theories including the Davidsonian, demonstrative view for which I myself have argued. Gómez-Torrente argues that rival views make quotation “an eccentric or anomalous phenomenon.” I aim to turn the (...) methodological tables. I reply to his objections to my own version of a demonstrative account, and I show that disquotational proposals provide no better account of the data. I also show that, unlike the demonstrative account, disquotational views make an ungrounded distinction between quotations that semantically refer to their intuitive referents and others that merely speaker-refer to them. I conclude that the demonstrative account is to be preferred on abductive grounds. (shrink)

Post-Fregean theorists use 'quotation' to denote indifferently both colloquially called quotations (repetitions of prior utterances) and what I call 'displays': 'Rot' means red. Colloquially, quotation is a strictly historical property, not semantic or syntactic. Displays are semantically and syntactically distinctive sentential elements. Most displays are not quotations. Pure echo quotations (Cosmological arguments involve "an unnecessary shuffle") aren't displays. Frege-inspired formal languages stipulate that enquotation forms a singular term referring to the enquoted expression (type). Formalist enquotations differ semantically and (...) syntactically from natural language displays. Call them autonomes, and mark them with stars: *Rot* means red. In formal languages, an unenstarred expression has only one meaning, and an autonome has only one meaning viz., a name (or indexical) designating the unenstarred expression (type). Stars have semantic content and can’t disambiguate. Display punctuation only disambiguates; it says only: This material is displayed. Displays have a semantic function; their marks don't.nDisplays are not terms or lexical items. Displays are objects incorporable into utterances. Such incorporation enables them to be linguistically appropriated much as we appropriate speech-external objects by extrasentential supplementation (e.g., gesturing) to identify the extension of a term by ostending the object -- but now without any extrasentential supplement. Displays are always adjunctive to an (implicit or explicit) ostensionable term, a term whose extension is identifiable by ostending an object. The display-ostensionable term extension relations are various. A display may (1) be the term's referent, or (2) represent the term's extension by (a) replicating or (b) instantiating or (c) expressing the term's referent, or (e) instantiating the property the term predicates. (shrink)

In a novel move against Russellianism, Heck (2014) has argued that reports of the form S believes that p are semantically opaque on the grounds that there are no other means in English to report psychologically individuated beliefs, such as those Lois Lane reports using the names ‘Superman’ and ‘Clark Kent.’ I show that there are several other ways to meet this need. I focus on quotational reports of the form S believes “p,” which philosophers have overlooked or mischaracterized. I (...) argue that reports of this form are no more metalinguistic than those using the complementizer that. In both, the meaning of the report depends on the meaning, not the form, of the complement. Some distinguishing features of non-metalinguistic quotational reports are that their complements force “deictic shift” and have no transparent interpretation. Free direct speech and thought bubbles have the same properties. The “q-ascriptions” McCullagh (2017a) proposed to defend Russellianism against Heck are not in common use and on his account are unsuitably metalinguistic. The fact that quotational belief reports are opaque without being metalinguistic makes the Russellian thesis that the meaning of a name is its referent untenable, thereby undermining Russellianism about belief reports. (shrink)

In "Demonstratives or Demonstrations", Marga Reimer argues that quotation marks are demonstrations and that expressions enclosed with them are demonstratives. In this paper, I argue against her view. There are two objections. The first objection is that Reimer''s view has unattractive consequences: there is more ambiguity, there are more demonstratives, and there are more English expressions than we thought. The second objection is that, unlike other ambiguous expressions, some expressions that are ambiguous on Reimer''s view can''t be disambiguated by (...) using subscripts. This suggests that, contrary to her view, those expressions aren't really ambiguous. (shrink)

In this case-study, I examine examples which fall within the five categories of the re-use of texts in the Nyāya Sūtra, Nyāya Bhāṣya, and Nyāya Vārttika and note the form of quoting and embedment. It is found that the re-use of texts is prominent and that the category and method of embedding the re-used passages varies from author to author. Gautama embeds the most interlanguage quotations without acknowledging his sources and Uddyotakara re-uses the most quotations and paraphrases while acknowledging his (...) sources. Vātsyāyana re-uses the most direct quotations but only acknowledges his sources about half the time. Each author re-uses textual material for two reasons: to demonstrate his authority in this field; and to support his own arguments and to critique objections and opposing theories. Differences crop up in the methodologies of Gautama, Vātsyāyana, and Uddyotakara as the concept of an authority shifts over time, as the body of literature grows, and as new objections and opponents arise. (shrink)

Quotation is employed in mentioning linguistic items with varying degrees of specificity depending upon context, occasionally in the service of multiple purposes. It is also often employed in cases where the mentioned items are simultaneously being used in their ordinary roles. I argue that against appearances to the contrary, the recently proposed formal disambiguation approach to quotation fails to account for this quotational mixing of use and mention. I further argue that, given the ubiquity of the mixing in (...) question, the demonstrative theory, in its ability to accommodate such cases, fares better than its rivals. (shrink)

Quote marks, I claim, serve to select from the multiple ostensions that are produced whenever any expression is uttered; they act to constrain pragmatic ambiguity or indeterminacy. My argument proceeds by showing that the proffered account fares better than its rivals-the Name, Description, Demonstrative, and Identity Theories. Along the way I shall need to explain and emphasize that quoting is not simply the same thing as mentioning. Quoting, but not mentioning, relies on the use of conventional devices.

The name theory has largely been discarded in the literature on quotation. In this paper, I resurrect the theory under the heading of the natural name theory. According to the natural name theory, a pure quotation is a natural, rather than an arbitrary, name of a linguistic item. As with other natural names, like onomatopoeia, pure quotations resemble their referents. I argue that this observation allows us to deflate the arguments traditionally thought to undermine the name theory. Then (...) I argue for the “multiplicity thesis,” that pure quotations name a wide variety of linguistic items, such as expression types, graphemes, spellings, phonemes, pronunciations, meanings, and senses. Then I show that while the natural name theory easily accommodates the multiplicity thesis, none of the major, viable alternatives to it likewise do. (shrink)

The term 'covert mixed quotation' describes cases in which linguistic material is interpreted in the manner of mixed quotation — that is, used in addition to being mentioned — despite the superficial absence of any commonly recognized conventional devices indicating quotation. After developing a novel theory of mixed quotation, I show that positing covert mixed quotation allows us to give simple and unified treatments of a number of puzzling semantic phenomena, including the projective behavior of (...) conventional implicature items embedded in indirect speech reports and propositional attitude ascriptions, so-called 'c-monsters,' metalinguistic negation, metalinguistic negotiation, and 'in a sense' constructions. (shrink)

Quotation marks are ambiguous, although the conventional rules that govern their different uses are similar in that they contain quantifications over quotable expressions. Pure uses are governed by a simple rule: by enclosing any expression within quotation marks one gets a singular term, the quotation, that stands for the enclosed expression. Impure uses are far less simple. In a series of uses the quotation marks conventionally indicate that (part of) the enclosed expression is a contextually appropriate (...) version of expressions uttered by some relevant agent. When the quotation marks have this meaning, it is tempting to think of them as contributing that indication to the truth-conditional content of the utterance. I adopt a cautious attitude towards this hypothesis, for the evidence in its favor is inconclusive. In other uses the quotation marks conventionally indicate that the enclosed expression should be used not “plainly” but in some broadly speaking “distanced” way, or that it is being so used by the utterer, and typically context makes clear the exact nature of the “distance” at stake. In these cases the quotation marks do not even appear to contribute that indication to the truth-conditional content of the utterance. (shrink)

When quotations are used with a purely referential purpose, they are mostly used with the purpose of referring to expressions, in the sense of rather abstract expression types. However, in many cases purely referential quotations are used with the purpose of referring to things other than very abstract expression types, such as boldface types, sounds, particular tokens, etc. The paper deals with the question of what mechanism underlies the possibility of successfully referring to different things and kinds of things with (...) one and the same quotation. I defend the view that a quotation has as its semantic reference a certain very abstract expression type, and that the possibility of referring to other things by means of it is to be explained as a pragmatic phenomenon of felicitously conveyed speaker reference. (shrink)

Peter Kivy has argued that scholars of the music of Dimitri Shostakovich are misguided when they make interpretations that attribute complex extra-musical content to works of his that bear no indications of such content, such as a title or an explicitly announced programme. Upon Kivy’s account, such works should rather be approached in terms of absolute music. In this paper, I show some decisive weaknesses in this critique. Drawing on the relevant philosophical literature, I examine Shostakovich’s use of musical quotations—an (...) essential feature of his compositions that Kivy ignores—and the significant role these play in constructing the extra-musical content of his works. Relying, in part, on recent research on authorial intentions, I also argue that the criteria Kivy presents for the reclassification of, seeming cases of, absolute music music as programme music is too strict. Such reclassifications need not be accompanied by an explanation as to why the composer has not provided any direct public indication of the content of the work, as Kivy insists. (shrink)

In this essay I argue for a constructivist account of the entities composing the object languages of Davidsonian truth theories and a quotational account of the reference from metalinguistic expressions to interpreted utterances. I claim that ‘radical quotation’ requires an ontology of repeatable events with strong similarities to Derrida's account of iterable events. In part one I summarise Davidson's account of interpretation and Olav Gjelsivk's arguments to the effect that the syntactic individuation of linguistic objects is only workable if (...) interpreters make richer assumptions about semantic properties than Davidson can tolerate. In part two I show that the objectivist account of syntactic objects which Gjelsivk's arguments presuppose is incompatible with one corollary of Davidsonian semantic indeterminacy: namely, the relativity of language to interpretative scheme. In place of this an account of radical interpretation is presented in which a quotational theory of metalinguistic reference furnishes the requisite relativity. In part three I argue that this account requires that particular utterance events must be repeatable to be radically quotable and give reasons why particularity and repeatability are not incompatible. (shrink)

The Kāśikāvṛtti, the oldest available complete commentary on Pāṇini’s grammar, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, is found quoted often in the later Pāṇinian grammatical tradition. These quotations throw light on a number of aspects of the text of the Kāśikāvṛtti. This paper focuses on how this later Pāṇinian grammatical tradition views the modifications in the text of the Aṣṭādhyāyī and concludes that also the tradition ascribes these modifications to the Kāśikāvṛtti. Further, this paper also attempts to show that these quotations can be shown (...) to have interacted with the manuscript tradition of the Kāśikāvṛtti and indeed with the help of these quotations it becomes easier to better understand the manuscript transmission of the Kāśikāvṛtti. Thus, this article focuses on one of the applications of the study of quotations: through an analysis of the content of the quoted passages of the Kāśikāvṛtti in later Grammatical literature, it discusses the history of the transmission of the KV and of the text it comments upon, i.e., Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī. It also shows how a study of quotations is an unavoidable complement of the analysis of manuscripts for scholars aiming at the reconstruction of texts so remote in time. (shrink)

This essay proposes a systematic semantic account of Davidson’s demonstrative theory of pure quotation (Davidson Theory and decision, 11: 27–40, 1979) within a classic Kaplan-style framework for indexical languages (Kaplan 1977). I argue that Davidson’s informal hints must be developed in terms of the idea of ‘character-external’ aspects of meaning, that is, in terms of truth-conditionally idle restrictions on the class of contexts in which quotation marks may appropriately be used. When thus developed, Davidson’s theory may correctly take (...) into account the intuitively special status of disquotational sentences, such as “Boston’ refers to Boston’, and “‘Boston” refers to ‘Boston”, and is thus immune from the important objections recently raised in Cappelen and Lepore 2007. (shrink)

I focus on one approach to understanding quotation, the identity theory; I delineate varieties thereof; and I cite some considerations for favoring a speech-act version. Along the way we shall see how the study of quotation can illuminate the general conflict between speech-act semantics and formal semantics, and we shall see fresh arguments for insisting that the mechanism of quotation is referentially indeterminate.

Many stanzas of the Ṛgvedasaṃhitā are re-used in the liturgical literature, that is, mainly in the Saṃhitās of the Yajurveda and in the Brāhmaṇas. Most of them are quoted precisely and they are apportioned in each different rite; yet, there are quite a few cases in which some variations have been adopted and the material of the sourcetext has been manipulated. As to the cultural development that resulted in such a use of the hymns, one of the most intriguing question (...) is whether it was a mere redactional enterprise, or if a clear intention guided the choices that the creators of the liturgies have taken, and eventually how deep was the consciousness of the brāhmaṇical redactors as for the poetic elements of the material they were dealing with. In order to approach this question, I decided to focus on a specific aspect that this issue entails, namely the different ways with which the Ṛgvedic verses are integrated in the texts. Thus, the present paper aims at analysing various modalities of re-use and at examining their functions. The final part of the article takes into consideration some instances of quotations’ marks. (shrink)

Research on quotation has mostly focussed in the past years on mixed or open quotation. In a recent book-length discussion of the topic, Cappelen and Lepore have abandon their previous Davidsonian allegiances, proposing a new view that they describe as minimalist, to a good extend on the basis of facts concerning mixed quotation. In this paper I critically review Cappelen and Lepore’s new minimalist proposals, briefly outlining my preferred Davidsonian view as a useful foil. I explore first (...) their allegedly non-Davidsonian, anti-contextualist views about pure quotation, and then their new views on mixed quotation. I have complained in the first place that their proposals are not presented as perspicuously as they should be; and in the second place that, when we have a clearer picture of what appears to be the favoured account, the differences with their previous proposals and others already in the literature are not as great as they claim. (shrink)

This is a study of the syntax and semantics of reports containing speech-act and propositional attitude verbs with quotational complements. I make the case that while the quotational complements of some verbs, including _utter_, are nominal and metalinguistic, those of others, including _assert_ and _believe_, are clausal and nonmetalinguistic. Quotational reports with ‘say’ are ambiguous. When quotational complements are clausal, they are like _that_-clauses in being subordinate content clauses with main-clause form. Unlike _that_-clauses, quote-clauses force deictic shift and are unambiguously (...) opaque. I also argue that quotation marks serve a different function in “mixed” reports, and that use of the traditional “direct” and “indirect” is not consistent with their traditional definitions. (shrink)

According to the quotational theory of meaning ascriptions, sentences like “‘Bruder means brother” are abbreviated synonymy claims, such as “‘Bruder means the same as ‘brother’”. After discussing a problem with Harman’s version of the quotational theory, I present an amended version defended by Field. Then, I address Field’s responses to two arguments against the theory that revolve around translation and the understanding of foreign expressions. Afterwards, I formulate two original arguments against both Harman’s and Field’s versions of the theory. One (...) of them targets the hyperintensionality of quotations and the other raises a problem pertaining to variant spellings of words. (shrink)