A pragmaticist feels the tug of semantics: Recanati’s 'Open quotation revisited'

In this contribution, I offer a critical discussion of chapter 8 of Truth-Conditional Pragmatics, a minimally modified version of François Recanati’s second classic paper on quotation, “Open Quotation Revisited” (2008). I argue that some concessions that Recanati seems ready to make to proponents of semantic accounts of quotation should not be made. Although semantic theories are more explicit than pragmatic ones, the latter’s empirical coverage is superior, due to the essentially non- linguistic, pictorial, nature of quotation.