ABSTRACT
This chapter lays out a semantic framework for quotation by drawing inspiration from the theoretical issues of truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP) and the fundamental understanding of quotation respectively. It sets out to address the nature of quotation and presents a typology of quotation on the basis of the syntactic-semantic criteria. The chapter expresses that all types of quotation have the same feature: quotation is simultaneously used and mentioned. TCP, as a contextualist semantic theory, can provide a semantic/pragmatic (S/P) perspective to resolve the S/P dispute in quotation studies. As a self-reflexive device, quotation presents a metarepresentational way of relating language to the world. The language–world relationship in quotational phenomenon is represented as a language–language relationship. The dual nature of quotation as representational or metarepresentational has significant impacts on the characterization of the semantic contribution of quotation simpliciter to quotational sentences.
