François Recanati’s radical pragmatic theory of quotation

Quoting, at its core, is a piece of communicative behaviour that a quoter performs in order to represent a set of (often linguistic or discursive) properties of some object. This the quoter does by establishing a pictorial relationship between a (partly) verbal display and what it represents. Stated more radically, quotation is in essence a piece of iconic signalling. Only under particular circumstances is it made to play a truly linguistic role in an utterance. This, essentially, is the position that I understand François Recanati to have been defending for over 10 years now. The formulation I have chosen is somewhat provocative, and I could certainly have phrased Recanati’s views in blander language. But that would have involved the risk of concealing their radicalism, which would have been a shame. In this essay, I start by presenting the main aspects of Recanati’s theory, largely conforming to the order in which he introduces these in chapter 7 of Truth-Conditional Pragmatics. Here and there I pause and examine at greater length the differences there may be with the 2001 paper and look into what I identify as problematic issues.