Dag Westerståhl: Remarks on quotation and compositionality

Forskarseminarium

Dag Westerståhl: Remarks on quotation and compositionality Quotation is not compositional." I start by a general and precise formulation of this familiar claim, under which it is essentially true. Is this a problem? If we think that quotation is an important linguistic mechanism, and that compositionality a reasonable requirement on any semantics, it is. Not wanting to revise what I take to be the most straightforward account of pure quotation, I look at two ways to revise compositionality: (1) Be content with recursive, rather than compositional, semantics; (2) Use what Peter Pagin and I call *general compositionality*. I end up opting for the latter.