Accounting for non-constituents in hybrid quotations: Why unquotation is not the answer

Abstract

This paper addresses a serious challenge to some recent semantic accounts of quotation: the existence of ‘non-constituent hybrid quotations’, as in Vera said she was ‘very happy and incredibly relieved’ by the supreme court’s decision. These pose a threat to theories that have to make the assumption that hybrid quotations must be co-extensive with syntactic constituents. Responses to the challenge have been proposed, first a quote-breaking procedure, and subsequently unquotation. I argue that these responses fall short of providing empirically satisfactory accounts of the phenomena. Other theories of quotation are not under threat of non-constituent hybrid quotations. I single out a particular family of theories, depiction theories, which have the added advantage of doing justice to the core mechanisms at the heart of quoting.