Friday, February 26: Josef Stern

Please join us this Friday as Josef Stern from the Philosophy Department presents work on quotation.

Date and Time: Friday, February 26, 10:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m.

Location: Rosenwald 208 (Linguistics seminar room)

Title: Quotations and pictures

Abstract:

Quotation (q-)marks are currently used for two main reasons: to quote someone’s utterance or inscription (e.g., “Trump said: ‘I will make America great!’”) and to mention words (e.g., “ ‘Love’ is a four letter word”).  Over the last 50 years there has been an explosion of work by philosophers and linguists on q-marks but almost all of it has focused on their use in mentioning, either ignoring quotation or assimilating it to mentioning.  In the first parts of this paper I sketch the disjoint histories of q-marks in the two practices to identify the explananda and show that the marks “ ‘‘’… ‘’’ ” are homonymous.  For the rest of the paper I concentrate almost entirely on the use of q-marks in quotation, present the semantic problems raised by quotation, and, drawing on three features of pictures, show how quotations can be best analyzed using these pictorial notions.  Time permitting, I will discuss the figurative use of q-marks: scare-quoting.