March 21, 2008: Chung-chieh Shan, Interpreting Quotations

Mixed quotes are quotes that appear to mix mention and use, or direct and indirect quotation, such as "Quine says that quotation `has a certain anomalous feature.'" I argue that mixed quotation is a general phenomenon that pervades the interpretation of language. In fact, most of our speech consists of mixed quotes of ourselves and each other. Of course, because the vast majority of utterances do not call for quotation marks in print, this point is only plausible if we broaden the notion of mixed quotation to include many of them. My first order of business is thus to explain a broader notion of mixed quotation, which depends on an abstract notion of grammatical constructions. I then relate quotation to Gödel numbering and use quotation to analyze naming and quantification.