The Semantics and Pragmatics of Hybrid Quotations

Abstract

This paper examines a type of quotation – ‘hybrid quotations' – that has received quite a bit of attention from philosophers, semanticists and pragmaticists over the last dozen years or so. Theoretical debates have centred on the question whether the contribution to content of such quotations is semantic in essence, or pragmatic. After presenting prototypical examples of ‘mixed quotation' and ‘scare quoting', the two sub-types of hybrid quotations usually distinguished by specialists, I outline the two main ways of approaching them – as semantic or pragmatic phenomena – and point up their strong and weak points. When that is done, I present several empirical facts that may help us decide which sort of theory is more likely to prevail eventually. In the process, the reader can get acquainted with some of the remarkable variety that hybrid quotation offers.