Relevance And Understanding Of Quotation

Quotations are so pervasively used in daily language that the proper use and interpretation of them consist of a considerable part of pragmatic or communicative competence. The study of this linguistic phenomenon thus bears both theoretic and practical significance. The standard types of quotation include pure quotation (mention), direct quotation, indirect quotation and mixed quotation (Cappelen and Lepore 1997a). The originals of these quotations may be mental representations (e.g. thoughts), public representations (e.g. utterances) or abstract representations (e.g. sentences and propositions). Quotation may merely resemble the original, rather than being an identical or verbatim reproduction. Sometimes the presence of a quotation is overtly marked (e.g. by quote marks or a verb of saying), but at other times, it is left to the hearer to infer. This raises the question of how the hearer can recognize the presence of a quotation, the source and type of the original, and the degree of resemblance intended. The present research, assuming that a comprehensive account of quotation is supposed to answer all the questions raised above, conducts a general survey into the existing accounts of quotation. Traditional accounts of quotation treat quotation as verbatim reproduction of the original, even in indirect quotation, where the form of the report may differ substantially from the original,the report clause is analyzed as having the same semantic structure as the original. Herbert H. Clark & Richard J. Gerrig's theory, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore's theory and Paul Saka's theory avoid this weakness. They note that quotation is not necessarily a verbatim reproduction of the original. However, none of them seems to recognize that resemblance is in the very nature of quotation. Moreover, they provide no pragmatic account of how the hearer can resolve the various indeterminacies listed above. The relevance theoretic account of quotation treats quotation as a variety of metarepresentation. According to Deirdre Wilson, the varieties of metarepresentation, public, mental and abstract, can be analyzed in terms of a notion of representation by resemblance. Accordingly, resemblance is in the very nature of quotation by this analysis. The thesis gives a general description of the existing account of quotation. The analysis of quotation within the relevance-theoretic framework is the focus of this thesis. It also tentatively employs the relevance-theoretic strategy to solve all the indeterminacies mentioned above. It argues that relevance theory can provide a more adequate theoretical framework for quotation than those discussed so far.