Abstract
I defend a semantic theory of quotation marks, according to which these
are ambiguous, as they have several different acceptations involving corresponding
different conventional indications. In particular, in allusion (“mixed”) uses, the
corresponding conventional indication is one with an adverbial or prepositional
content, roughly equivalent to “using the quoted expression or an appropriate
version of it”. And in “scare” uses, the corresponding conventional indication
is that the enclosed expression should be used not plainly but in some broadly
speaking distanced way, or that it is being so used by the utterer. I also defend
this view against some alternative views on which allusion and distance indications
are to be seen as pragmatically conveyed. In particular, I consider several views
that attempt to explain especially allusion and distance indications as pragmatic
suggestions generated from a meager conventional basis, and I argue that they
cannot accommodate a number of linguistic phenomena and reflectively supported
theses about the use of quotation marks. I lay special emphasis on the fact that the
main pragmatic theories fail to pass an extremely plausible test for challenges to
polysemic accounts of an expression.