ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book introduces the research background of how the author explores the meaning of quotation. It establishes an account of the meaning of quotation, which is informed not just by the philosophical debate over the semantics/pragmatics boundary, but also by developments in theories of quotation. The book adopts a broad sense of quoted expression and takes it as a generic term to subsume what might fall in between quotation marks in disregard of the semantic connotation of the word expression and meaningfulness or meaninglessness of the embedded item per se. It expresses that the construal of quotation paves the way for understanding the meaning of quotation in terms of its semantic contribution to the quotational sentence. The reflexive capacity of quotation is observed by Willard Van Orman Quine as he exploited it to formulate a use/mention distinction for logical clarification.
