'Monstrous' quotation


Emar Maier

Kaplan's (1989) argumentation against the possibility of so-called monsters, i.e. context shifting/characterial/non-intensional operators, in natural language depends on his quick dismissal of quotation as a monster. Too quick, I will argue, providing examples of mixed quotations (see e.g. Cappelen & Lepore 1997) with shifted indexicals, and arguing that mixed quotation at least is immune to Kaplan's objection. A case in point is (1), a mixed quotation (a piece of direct quotation in the complement of an indirect discourse construction) in which the indexical both of us does not refer to the actual writer of (1), but requires a shift to the original context of the reported speech act:

(1)    Their accord on this issue, he said, has proved "quite a surprise to both of us''

Of course, reports in oratio recta also require such shifts, but then, Kaplan objects, direct quotation is not an operator in any object language since it involves mentioning expressions or utterances rather than using them to contribute their ordinary contents. I will argue that for mixed quotations this objection does not hold since they involve ordinary use of the quoted expressions (which is argued for in various recent publications on mixed and related varieties of quotation Cappelen & Lepore (1997), Recanati (2001), Geurts (200?), and Predelli (2003)).