November 27, 2018: Jan Wislicki

Time:: 5:00pm, November 27, 2018
Place:: Keio University, Mita Campus,
South Annex, 7th floor
Speaker:: Jan Wislicki (University of Warsaw)
Title:: Quotation as a modality
Abstract:: In a long-standing research on quotational expressions (QEs), a relatively small progress has been made in understanding the relation between quotation and the quoted content, as well as the properties of the latter. Logic and philosophical investigations inspired by Tarski (1933/1983) take QEs as semantically atomic. So do formal semantic approaches (cf. Pafel 2011; Potts 2007), where QEs are treated as constants defined on phonological strings. First, I discuss data showing modal predicate logic, as well as strictly modal properties of QEs. I show not only that the exponent of quotation behaves like a modal operator, but also that QEs involve quantification over (possible) models. I argue that QEs are essentially modal expressions switching the interpretation across models, in much the same way as standard modals switch the interpretation across worlds. Such an approach allows to derive QEs from the quoted expression without losing their original complexity, while in the same time accounting for their anomalous properties, e.g. intensionality, context-shifts or recursive character. In this regard the machinery extends the groundbreaking work by Shan (2010) and Maier (2014), proposing a conceptually more rigorous and descriptively more fine-grained account of QEs.

Semantics Research Group Meeting, November 27, 2018