Monsters and I: The Case of Mixed Quotation

Abstract

According to Kaplan (Demonstratives: An essay on the semantics, logic, metaphysics, and epistemology of demonstratives and other indexicals. In: J Almog, J Perry, H. Wettstein (eds) Themes from Kaplan. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 481–563, 1989a), the semantic value of an indexical is fixed by the context of the current speech act, except for its occurrences in quotation. However, contrary to this thesis, now known as ‘Fixity’ (Schlenker, A plea for monsters, Linguist Philos 26:29–120, 2003), subsequent discussions have demonstrated that the content of pure indexicals can be fixed by the intended speech act (Predelli, Erkenntnis 74:289–303, Analysis, 2011). Cross-linguistically, Fixity also proves untenable for languages such as Amharic where the referent of a first-person pronoun can be drawn from the reporting context or the reported situation (Schlenker). In this paper we focus on the variety of ways the English first-person singular pronoun is interpreted in quotation, focusing on mixed quotation, and argue that (i) mixed quotation is a case of language use and, pace Kaplan, the behaviour of first-person pronouns in mixed quotation is relevant for, and testifies against, Fixity; (ii) mixed quotation induces context-shifts or a generalisation over contexts that can be captured in terms of what we call ‘character-at-issue’ and ‘content-at-issue’ uses; and (iii) the extant contextualist accounts that appear to be best suited to account for the diversity of use do not pursue the interpretation of first-person pronouns in quotation to its logical end. To remedy this weakness we demonstrate how the use of first-person indexicals in these Fixity-defying contexts (Kaplan’s ‘monster’ contexts) can be accounted for in the radical contextualist theory of Default Semantics (Jaszczolt, Default semantics: Foundations of a compositional theory of acts of communication. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005; Default semantics. In: B Heine, H Narrog (eds) The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 215–246, 2010; Meaning in linguistic interaction: semantics, metasemantics, philosophy of language. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016). Overall, we conclude that ‘I’ is not an indexical term and quotation is not a monster, which points to the possibility that indexicals are a philosophers’ fiction.