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

[Japanese | English]

Time:
4:30pm, March 21, 2008
Place:
Keio University, Mita Campus,
North Building, Conference Room 2 (2nd floor).
Speaker:
Chung-chieh Shan, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Title:
Interpreting Quotations
Abstract:

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.

Semantics Research Group
Sponsored by the Global COE program Center for Advanced Research on Logic and Sensibility, Keio University


Last modified: 2008-03-13 12:08:19 JST