Linguist and Philos (2016) 39:119–149

DOI 10.1007/s10988-015-9186-8

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Pure quotation, metalanguage and metasemantics

André Bazzoni1,2

Published online: 22 March 2016

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract Every theory of pure quotation embraces in some form or another the intu-
itively obvious thesis that pure quotations refer to their quoted expressions. However,
they all remain vague (and sometimes even inconsistent) about the nature of these
latter. This paper proposes to take seriously the fact that quoted items are semantic,
not syntactic objects, and to develop therefrom a semantics for pure quotation that
retains the basic intuitions and at the same time circumvents standard problems.

Keywords Pure quotation · Metalanguage · Syntax/semantics · Structure ·

Compositionality · Semantic computability

1 Introduction

Representational devices always feature an intrinsic double life. They simultaneously

perform a presentational and a representational function. The former comes from
their very existence in the world, whereas the latter depends on their conventionally
attributed role of representing, their ‘standing for’ some other entity.
A one-dollar bill is a greenish piece of paper on which one can hastily take note of
some important information during a work meeting, and which has a certain texture,
a certain format, certain inscriptions and a certain photography on it etc. A one-dollar
bill is also US money, and thereby possesses a certain trade value enabling people to
exchange it against different sorts of services, merchandises etc.

B André Bazzoni
andrebazzoni@gmail.com

1 Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, USA

2 Department of Philosophy, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil

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120 A. Bazzoni

Similarly, the subject of the sentence:

(1) The Evening Star has three words
can be a graphic sequence of characters, or the planet Venus—though in practice the
absurdity of the latter interpretation typically leads us to select the former as the correct
option.
The starting point of our discussion is the simple observation that, at the metalin-
guistic (or still better as we shall see, metasemantic) level, quoted items are treated as
presentational entities, as entities of the world and, as such, as semantic entities.
I shall first outline the formal background on which the theory to be proposed will
be based, and then I will show how the basic semantic idea will fit into that framework.
The role of quotation marks in the framework will be addressed, and evidence
provided for the claim that they are not merely selection tools enabling us to pick out
the presentational reading of sentences of the kind of (1).
I shall then hold the general thesis that the function of quotation marks (in pure-
quotation expressions; cf. below) is to allow expressing semantic entities in the syntax
of languages. This means that quoted items in quotation expressions are really semantic
entities, and as a consequence they cannot be linguistically presented without quotation
marks: semantic entities cannot be direct constituents of syntactic expressions—a tree
cannot be a constituent of a sentence, and neither can a drawing of a tree, for they
are both semantic entities, objects of the world; but a drawing of a tree surrounded
by quotation marks could,1 because quotation marks turn the whole quotation into a
syntactic object.
Quotation in general is not as homogeneous as the simplicity of its typography
could suggest—see Sect. 9.10 below. This paper studies one of its manifestations
called pure quotation. It turns out that a precise characterization of pure quotation
is slippery enough for authors to usually prefer examples instead of definitions. And
so shall I—the vague definition that pure quotations are those that play the role of
purely referring singular terms should suffice for our purposes. Hereafter follow some
examples of quotations that are not pure:
• Israel finally became ‘one’ nation
• Galileo said that ‘the earth moves’
• According to the President, harsh times ‘stimulate our minds’
Back to pure quotations, I shall describe how that initial view gives rise to a seman-
tic analysis of quotation expressions taking seriously the fact that quoted items are
semantic entities, and how this semantics is compositional and computable. I further
show how this relates to an important issue about quotation going back to the so-called
Proper Name theory of quotation. Specifically, the classic objection to this theory in
connection with the unstructuredness of quotation expressions turns out to be miscon-
ceived: what is required is not really semantic structure, but semantic computability.

1 The issue of which sorts of entities should count as quotable items is currently the object of an open
debate—the extreme opposite sides are represented by Saka, who believes that non-linguistic items cannot
be quoted; and Cappelen and Lepore, who believe to the contrary. The present theory does not depend on
this kind of judgement, though.

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Pure quotation, metalanguage and metasemantics 121

The specification ‘taking seriously’ in the preceding paragraph has a precise sense.
In fact, a number of (not to say all) approaches to the semantics of quotation at some
point seem to hold something similar to the view that quoted items are semantic objects.
However, none of them take this fact really seriously. They all end up mixing (often
in intervals of only a few lines in a same page) statements approaching quoted items
either to semantic, or to syntactic elements—with an apparent long-term preference
for the latter option.
Two existing accounts, namely by Cappelen–Lepore and Potts, will then be ana-
lyzed. They are related to the present theory, but they feature undesirable side effects
stemming from their failure to unambiguously distinguish expressions qua syntac-
tic from expressions qua semantic entities. Specifically, Cappelen and Lepore treat
quotations as semantically structured expressions, whereas Potts’ semantics is non-
compositional.
I also examine the approach put forward by Gómez-Torrente (2013), which does
appear to make some confusion at the expository level, just as in the cases of Cappelen–
Lepore and Potts, between expressions as syntactic/semantic elements, but unlike
those two accounts Gómez-Torrente’s seems to be more careful about such a distinc-
tion when dealing with central issues about structuredness and reference-fixing. As a
consequence, Gómez-Torrente is more prepared to elude the kinds of side effects faced
by the two other theories. However, he still seems to presuppose some kind of struc-
ture in quotation expressions, except that now the structure is pushed away into a less
immediately important linguistic level of analysis, namely the morphological level. I
criticize this strategy and claim that there is no structure involved in pure-quotation
expressions at all. It seems that what prevented Gómez-Torrente from achieving the
correct unstruturedness-like account was again the failure to take seriously the fact
that quoted items are semantic entities.
Finally, I conclude with a survey of some classical questions raised by standard
theories of quotation in connection with our discussion.

2 Expressions as semantic entities

Let us first fix some bits of terminology. For instance, what is meant by some expression
being presentational, as opposed to representational? The starting point may be made
through Searle’s famous statement to the effect that in a pure-quotation expression,
“[t]he word itself is presented and then talked about, and that it is to be taken as
presented rather than used conventionally to refer” (Searle 1969, pp. 75–76, Searle’s
emphasis).
In other words, we start from the reasonable idea that an expression of a language
can function either as a syntactical item of that language, or as an entity of an underlying
semantic universe. We shall henceforth restrict the application of the term expression
only to syntactical items.
It is an interesting question whether every object of a semantic universe can function
as an expression under the mediation of the quotation device. But let us just stipulate
here that when it can, it is a quotable.

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2.1 A framework

Let us be given a grammar described as a syntactic algebra E = E, E t , , where E

is the set of expressions of E generated from the set E t of atomic expressions and the
set  of k-ary syntactic operators of the kind α (k) : E k → E.2
We next introduce the semantic function μ : E → M mapping the expressions of
E to the set M of semantic values3 ; and the quote function κ : Q → E q , from the set
Q ⊆ M of quotables to the set E q ⊂ E of quotations of E.
The idea is straightforward. Every expression is first of all an object: everything that
represents something is an object of the world in the first place. The English phrase
‘The Evening Star’ written on a piece of paper, which refers to (represents) the planet
Venus, is in the first place an object consisting in a sequence of graphic symbols on
a paper. Think of a strange alphabet that you have never seen before, of a strange
language that you have never heard about. Some strings of letters of that alphabet
are used by the speakers of the language to refer to objects of the world, but you can
only see their presentational function, you can only see them as material marks in the
world, just as a meaningless piece of chalk, or a chair, or a tree (forget for a moment
about their possible connotations).
Elements of a language are individuals of a peculiar kind: they also function as
expressions. As such, they may somehow link to the world; and as such, they may
be mere objects of the world. In the latter case, however, they are not individuals qua
expressions, but individuals qua quotables.
The point where the obviousness of the initial assumptions departs from standard
accounts is the precise interpretation of the fact that quoting expressions refer to their
quoted expressions, i.e., to the fact that ‘ ‘The Evening Star’ ’ refers to ‘The Evening
Star’.
It seems that the majority of the theories of quotation (perhaps with the reluc-
tant exceptions of Cappelen and Lepore (2007), Potts (2007), and Gómez-Torrente
(2013); cf. below) interprets the quoted element as a syntactic item. Syntactic items,
however, are elements of the language (unlike pieces of chalk, chairs and trees), hence
expressions.
The point to be stressed here is that quotations do not refer to expressions, they
refer to quotables.4 If one wishes to say that a quotation expression refers to the quoted
element, one should add the qualification that the former is an element-expression,
whereas the latter is an element-quotable; the two are not of the same nature. As it
happens, this is the source of some difficulties faced by standard theories of quotation,
as we shall see below.

2 This kind of description of a language follows Hodges (2001). Actually, Hodges works mainly with
terms—i.e., parsed syntactic trees—instead of expressions, but we shall not distinguish expressions and
terms here.
3 We suppose for simplicity that μ is total.
4 The notion of a quotable is not the same as that of a token (in the usual sense in which tokens are
distinguished from types), for one thing because tokens can be meaningful, whereas quotables cannot—as
semantic objects, quotables do not belong to the domain of μ. More on this point below.

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Those standard theories are usually represented by five trends, namely the Proper
Name, the Description, the Demonstrative, the Use/Identity, and the Disquotational
theories. Instead of introducing each of the main approaches to quotation found in
the literature, I shall go directly to the exposition of the new theory and its applica-
tion to pure quotation, leaving the background of the common and diverging points
with respect to the standard theories to some observations scattered throughout the
analysis.

2.2 Quotations without quotation marks

The quotation marks ‘ and ’ (and their respective variants in different civilizations)
are language symbols introduced with the aim of making explicit the kind of semantic
selection illustrated by sentence (1) above. As a matter of fact, we would normally
expect (1) to be presented rather as follows:
(2) ‘The Evening Star’ has three words.
Some have taken this observation to imply that quotation marks are exclusively
written devices displaying no counterpart in spoken language, and are thus dispensable
altogether. Indeed, there is no way of distinguishing (1) and (2) in spoken English.
Others contend that when sentences like (1) are deemed meaningful, they are such
only inasmuch as it can be supposed that quotation marks are actually implicitly
present. The following seemingly ungrammatical example [taken from Cappelen and
Lepore (2007, p. 41); the point is also made in Gómez-Torrente (2001)] would provide
evidence to this effect:
(3) *In the garden has three words.
The only way of making sense of (3), so goes the argument, is to suppose implicit
quotation marks surrounding the first three words of the sentence.
An important divide among theories of quotation faces on the one hand those
who advance a theory of quotation without quotation marks (for short QWQ)—e.g.,
Recanati (2001), Reimer (1996), Saka (1998) and Washington (1992)—, and on the
other hand those who believe that a theory of quotation can be limited without any loss
to the cases in which quotation marks are explicit (QQ henceforth)—e.g., Cappelen
and Lepore (2007) and Gómez-Torrente (2013).
The theory to be proposed here sides with the QQ party. I shall not pursue the details
of the ongoing debate QQ–QWQ [I refer the reader to the references above, and also
to Cappelen and Lepore (2012)], nor shall I venture to thoroughly assess the so-called
Use theories (obsoletely and misleadingly also known as Identity theories), which are
the classical sources of the QQ–QWQ distinction.
However, one specific feature of the Use theory emphasized in Gómez-Torrente
(2013) is highly relevant to our discussion. Use theories in fact postulate that it is the
quoted expression (or the speaker, in Saka’s version) in a quotation expression that
does the referring in this kind of expressions. According to the theory proposed here,

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this cannot possibly be so. It is on the contrary the whole expression that actually does
the referring.
If quotation marks so to speak turn semantic into syntactic entities, then quota-
tion marks cannot be optional linguistic devices. Without quotation marks, quoted
items remain semantic, and semantic objects cannot directly feature as constituents of
syntactic expressions.

3 Semantics

Consider a quotation expression such as κ(Hesperus), where Hesperus ∈ Q ⊆ M is

a quotable.5 We state that its semantic value is derived thus:
(4) μ(κ(Hesperus)) = Hesperus.
This is roughly our semantics for pure quotation.
Notice that, writing μ| Eq for the restriction of μ to E q , it follows that μ| Eq is
bijective, for on the one hand every quotation has a semantic value, namely the quotable
associated with it; and on the other hand, two different quotations cannot be associated
with the same quotable. Therefore, the inverse function (μ| Eq )−1 is well-defined, and
it is furthermore the same function as κ—that is to say, the quote function is the inverse
of the restriction of the semantic function to the set of quotations.6
We then have in the general case of a pure quotation κ(e) ∈ E q , for any quotable
e ∈ Q ⊆ M:
(5) μ(κ(e)) = μ| Eq ◦ (μ| Eq )−1 (e) = id(e) = e
where id is the (unary) identity function. In particular, as announced, we do not have
μ(κ(e)) = e ∈ E.
Before proceeding, it is worth observing that (5) works even in the extreme cases
of explicit reference to expressions, such as the following:
(6) ‘The Evening Star’ is an English expression.
Let me thus spell out in more detail what the compositional semantics of this
sentence looks like according to the present theory.7
In a model-theoretic setting, the truth conditions of (6) may be sketchily repre-
sented as follows, writing e for The Evening Star, P for the predicate ‘is an English

5 Boldface will be henceforth used to denote quotables. For clearness of notation, I shall not surround
these boldface elements with quotation marks when talking about quotables in my own discourse, unless
otherwise specified.
6 In this connection, notice that, as in the case of κ, unquoted expressions—i.e., the members of E\E —do
q
not belong to the range of (μ| E q )−1 .
7 The following discussion draws on comments by two anonymous referees, to whom I am indebted for
urging me to consider this important point—which in a previous version of the paper was dealt with in a
much sloppier way—more carefully.

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expression’, and P M for the extension of P with respect to the underlying model
M8 :
(7) (6) is true in M ⇔ μ(κ(e)) ∈ μ(P) ⇔ e ∈ P M .
This is just as it should be, for the rightmost expression of (7) expresses that a
certain semantic item (namely a quotable) belongs to the semantic value (extension)
of a predicate, which is also of the semantic type. The upshot is that we should
really think of the objects satisfying a property (which is the semantic value of the
respective predicate) as semantic objects, even if the object is the semantic value of
a pure-quotation expression. An element of a language is at the same time (let us put
aside for a moment my purely stipulated convention of calling only syntactic objects
‘expressions’) an expression qua semantic and an expression qua syntactic object.
If (6) is true, what to say about the following?
(8) ‘The Evening Star’ is a quotable.
As it turns out, the same analysis applies here but with the predicate ‘is a quotable’
instead of ‘is an English expression’, and with the result that (8) is true, for The
Evening Star is indeed a quotable—i.e., we have e ∈ Q M , with the obvious notation.
Contrast (6) and (8) with:
(9) ‘’ is an English expression.
(10) ‘’ is a quotable.
Now if we proceed to the kind of analysis presented above, we conclude that (9)
is false, for we have  ∈ / P M ; whereas (10) is true (assuming we can quote symbols
such as the one quoted in the sentence), for we have  ∈ Q M .
The contrast between those examples provides a good illustration of the first sen-
tence of this article, which says that representational devices always feature a double
life. The semantic entity The Evening Star is a representational device, belonging to
both Q M and P M . On the other hand,  is not a representational device (with respect
to the representational system of English), and thus belongs only to Q M . One can
mention (if at all)  as an object of the world, but one cannot use it as an expression
of English.
To fix ideas, let us review one more example (cf. also Sect. 9.5 below):
(11) ‘Hesperus’ refers to Hesperus.
In this case, ‘refers to’ is a binary relation, and the truth conditions of (11) are given
as follows—where h stands for Hesperus, and R denotes the binary relation ‘refers
to’—:

(11) is true in M ⇔ (μ(κ(h)), μ(h)) ∈ μ(R) ⇔ (h, h M ) ∈ R M

where h M is the object of the domain of M corresponding to Hesperus (i.e., Venus).

Again, the extension of ‘refers to’ contains ordered pairs of semantic items, and both
h and h M (i.e. respectively, Hesperus and Hesperus) are objects of the correct type—

8 In the context of our formal setting introduced above, this means that P is an element of E, whereas P M
is an element of M.

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126 A. Bazzoni

‘refers to’ is not semantically a relation between a syntactic object and a semantic
object, but between two semantic objects.9
It is worth noting that we would not have as a consequence of the analyses carried
out above that the following sentence is true:
(12) ‘Hesperus’ is a planet.
The reason is that the truth conditions of (12) would yield (with the obvious nota-
tions):

(12) is true in M ⇔ μ(κ(h)) ∈ μ(Pl ) ⇔ h ∈ PlM

but of course h does not belong to the extension of Pl —only h M does.

In standard theories of metalinguistic discourse, the strategy consists in introducing
linguistic expressions into the semantic domain of objects. Thus for example a proper
name such as ‘Hesperus’ is typically translated into the formal logical language as a
constant, e.g., h. The model-theoretic interpretation h M of h in some model M is
then an element of the domain of individuals of M.
Now if we consider the interpretation ‘h’M of the quotation expression ‘h’ in M
as h, which is a syntactic element, then it will follow that h is also a semantic element,
so that the domain of M contains the language itself. This does not ensue according
to the present viewpoint, because ‘h’M is not an element of the language—though it
may play that role. Of course in a sense, the distinction may seem vacuous, for the
well-formed expressions of some language are just objects that were singled out from
the world according to the formation rules of that language. However, the distinction
still helps in keeping separated the syntactic and semantic realms and in avoiding
theoretical problems, as we shall see.
If language is understood as a device for talking about the world, then the present
account amounts to treating pure quotation under such a perspective: as in the case of
‘bare’ (unquoted) linguistic expressions, quotation expressions are used to talk about
the world—not, as from the standard viewpoint, about language. Bare expressions refer
to their usual semantic referents, whereas quotation expressions refer to the material
form associated with their respective bare expressions. Quoting is the way in which
language manages to talk about certain items of the world that would stand otherwise
(i.e., if used as bare expressions) for their usual semantic referents. Therefore pure
quotation is in a sense, according to the present theory, a metasemantic rather than a
metalinguistic device.
Some have been tempted to see in the present account a strong similarity with
the Demonstrative theory. Since I shall not deal in detail with that theory, but rather
concentrate on certain versions of the Disquotational theory when dealing in later
sections with specific theories of quotation, let me take at this point a few lines to
reject any resemblance between the present account and the Demonstrative theory.
To begin with, quotables are not tokens. Tokens are particular uses of general
expression-types, and as such they are syntactic items. Tokens are meaningful, as

9 Notice that the first coordinate of the pairs belonging to the extension of R is always a quotable—in
particular, we have (h M , h) ∈
/ RM.

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types are. Quotables, on the other hand, are semantic items, just as chairs and trees,
and just as we do not say that this particular chair is a token of some general (maybe
a universal of) chair, we cannot say that this particular quotable is a token of some
general (maybe a universal of) quotable.
The standard version of the Demonstrative theory interprets a quotation expression
such as ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ along the following lines10 :
(13) Hesperus. The expression of which that is a token.
In (13), ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ is a token, not a quotable.
What would then be the difference, according to the present account, between the
quotables referred to by ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ and ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’? Specifically, how would
the present approach distinguish between (14), which is false, and (15), which is
true?
(14) ‘Hesperus’ is in italics.
(15) ‘Hesperus’ is in italics.
The crucial point to be stressed here is that a quotable is really what is inside the
quotation marks—and this seems to be the reason why one might take the present
theory to be a version of the Demonstrative theory. In some cases, different quotables
may be interchanged without changing the truth value of the sentence. For example in
“ ‘Hesperus’ has eight letters” (see (16) below), it does not matter for truth purposes
if we substitute ‘Hesperus’ for ‘Hesperus’, for the simple reason that both Hesperus
and Hesperus have eight ‘letter-quotables’. The point is that Hesperus and Hesperus
are not tokens, but they are different quotables, and this is enough to explain why (14)
is false and (15) is true.
Furthermore, the paraphrase in (13) interpreting quotation expressions in terms of
a definite description and a demonstrative pronoun has no counterpart in the present
account—there is strictly speaking no demonstration at all involved in the fact that
quotation expressions refer to the quotables featuring as their quoted items. Quotation
marks serve the purpose of turning semantic into syntactic items, whereas this is
obviously not the function of demonstratives.
Finally, according to the Demonstrative theory, what does the referring in a quota-
tion expression is the quotation marks, whereas in the present theory, it is the quotation
expression as a whole (cf. Sect. 9 below).

3.1 Compositionality

Among the different data and challenges typically faced by theories of quotation, one
of the most demanding is the issue of compositionality.
The informal version of the Principle of Compositionality states that the semantic
value of a compound expression is a function of the semantic values of its parts and

10 Predelli (2008) offers an updated version of Davidson’s ideas bearing on Kaplan’s logic of demonstra-
tives. I shall not discuss Predelli’s account, for it does not make Demonstrative theory any closer to the
theory proposed here.

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128 A. Bazzoni

the mode of composition. Among the data usually brandished by the disclaimers of
compositionality, one of the most emblematic is precisely the case of quotation.
The issue is commonly raised through the referential opacity related to quotation
expressions. This phenomenon is illustrated by the fact that ‘Hesperus’ cannot be
substituted salva veritate for ‘The Evening Star’ in (2), even though both expressions
share the same referent.
This manifests the failure of another well-known semantic principle, the Principle of
Substitutivity, which says that synonymous expressions (i.e., having the same semantic
value) are interchangeable in more complex expressions salva significatione. In other
words, if some complex e has e1 as one of its sub-expressions, and if e1 has the same
semantic value as e2 , then the semantic value of e does not change if we replace e1 by
e2 in e.
Hodges (2001) proved that compositionality and substitutivity are equivalent, under
the further hypothesis that sub-expressions of a meaningful (i.e., in the domain of
μ) expression are themselves meaningful. This further requirement is known as the
Domain Principle.

3.2 Compositional semantics

Suppose ‘Hesperus’ and ‘The Evening Star’ have the same standard semantic value
(or in the context of the present discussion, the same referent), namely the planet
Venus—i.e., we have μ(h) = μ(e), with the obvious notations. Now we have that
(16) ‘Hesperus’ has eight letters
is true, whereas “‘The Evening Star’ has eight letters” is false. Does this constitute an
example of violation of the principle of compositionality? Is it a violation of substitu-
tivity?
The answer is negative, because in order for ‘The Evening Star’ to be substitutable
salva veritate for ‘Hesperus’, it is not required that we have μ(h) = μ(e), but rather
that we have μ(Hesperus) = μ(The Evening Star), for the constituents of the two
quotations at stake are not the expressions ‘The Evening Star’ and ‘Hesperus’, but the
quotables The Evening Star and Hesperus.
But both Hesperus and The Evening Star belong to M, and the domain of μ is
E. Since we obviously have (in our framework) E ∩ M = ∅, it follows that Hesperus
and The Evening Star are necessarily outside the domain of μ, that is, they are not
meaningful.
To see more directly what is happening to compositionality in this case, and to
introduce the issue of semantic structure, let us leave aside substitutivity and ana-
lyze compositionality per se, i.e., directly from the statement that the semantic value
of a compound expression is a function of the semantic values of their constituent
expressions and the mode of composition.
The following formal version of the principle of compositionality is adapted from
Hodges (2001)—the notation will be clarified in a moment—:

μ(α (k) (e1 , . . . , en )) = r (α (k) , μ(e1 ), . . . , μ(en ))

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Pure quotation, metalanguage and metasemantics 129

From this perspective, what is required is that we derive the semantic value of (16)
from the semantic value of (inter alia) ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’, that is, we must come upon
some form along the following lines:
(17) μ((16)) = rα (μ(κ(Hesperus)), . . . )
where rα is a semantic operator (cf. below) associated with α. This is the formal
counterpart of the statement that the semantic value of the whole is a function of the
semantic values of its parts (the mode of composition being incorporated through the
index α of r ).
It is useful at this stage of the discussion to say more about compositionality and
semantic structure. As the reader recalls, we have been treating grammar as an algebra
E. In contrast, semantics has been so far understood as an arbitrary set M of semantic
values, with no inherent structure associated with it.
As matter of fact, the main effect of compositionality on an amorphous set of
semantic values is precisely to endow such a set with an algebraic structure M =
M, Mt , , where  is the set of semantic operators rα (k) of the form rα (k) : M k → M,
and Mt ⊂ M is the set of atomic semantic values, i.e., the range of the restriction of
μ to E t . Each rα is so to speak the Doppelgänger of the syntactic α, so we assume an
underlying one-to-one mapping dop :  → .
Now back to (17), we have by compositionality:
(18) μ(κ(Hesperus)) = rκ (μ(Hesperus)).
Besides the aforementioned problem related to the fact that Hesperus ∈ / dom(μ),
one detects an immediate ill-formedness associated with the compositional form of
(18), namely that we have also κ ∈ / .
In other terms, κ is not a syntactic operator, for the straightforward reason that its
domain is a subset of M. Therefore, dop is not defined for κ, and there is thus no such
semantic operator rκ associated with κ.
It seems that the wrong supposition involved in (17) is that ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ is a syn-
tactically complex expression. Actually, it is not, and not only with respect to syntactic
complexity, but to complexity in general. As we shall see, this is a fundamental point
where the present theory departs from certain others. To anticipate the facts, there is
no structure involved in quotation expressions at any linguistic level altogether.
Furthermore, without semantic structure the domain principle holds immediately,
for the real constituent of (16) is not Hesperus, but rather κ(Hesperus), and since the
latter is unstructured and meaningful, the domain principle is preserved. Substitutivity
(and therefore compositionality) then tells that we can substitute any ‘ ‘e’ ’ such that
μ(κ(Hesperus)) = Hesperus for ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ in that sentence salva veritate. But it is
obvious that there is only one expression of the right type, namely ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ itself.
We thus conclude that (5) is compositional in a trivial way11 : there is no semantic
structure involved in the determination of the semantic value of a quotation.

11 This is indeed a common point with the Demonstrative theory that could lead one to try to assimilate
both approaches. It seems to me, however, that the mere fact that both theories are trivially compositional
is too feeble an argument, in the light of the arguments to the contrary presented above, to be taken as
evidence that the present account is a version of the Demonstrative theory.

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130 A. Bazzoni

A further immediate conclusion is then that, contrary to what is commonly assumed,

opacity is not an issue for the semantics of pure quotation.12

4 Compositionality, structure and computability

It is important here not to confound the unstructuredness of quotational expressions

with the problem faced by the Proper Name theory in connection with its inability to
explain how speakers can understand novel quotation expressions that they never read
or heard before—also known as the understandability argument. As it happens, the
problem is allegedly due to the lack of structure of quotation expressions implied by
the Proper Name approach.13
To be sure, one could hardly speak of ‘structure’ (nor even ‘complexity’) with
respect to so to speak ‘cross-domain’ operations like μ and κ—strictly speaking,
something such as an ‘interalgebraic structure’ could only be associated, it seems to me,
with ‘structural preservation’ from one algebra to another, and this is mathematically
translated as what is called a homomorphism.14 The point, however, is that what
is needed to overcome the problem raised by the understandability argument is not
structure, nor even compositionality, but rather computability.
It is worth emphasizing that what we really need for quotation in connection with
the understandability argument is not exactly that the semantic values of quotation
expressions be compositional, but rather that they be computable. The understand-
ability argument requires an explanation of how speakers are able to figure out the
meaning of sentences that they never read or heard before, that is to say, how they are
able to compute such meanings.15
Semantic structure, however, is not necessarily related to semantic computabil-
ity (nor even to compositionality16 ). Lexical items, for example, are semantically
unstructured, but perfectly computable. Of course, this is achieved by the reasonable
assumption that their number is finite, and in general any semantic function mapping

12 Standard theories typically explain opacity in connection with quotations, mainly by holding (in different
ways according to different theories) that what is at issue in quotation is not the standard semantic value of
the quoted expressions, but rather these expressions themselves (see Washington 1992, pp. 604–605). What
I am claiming is that opacity is simply not even raised by quotation expressions, for there is no expression
involved at all in the quoted items, only quotables, which are meaningless entities.
13 The locus classicus of this kind of criticism is Davidson (1979); see also Cappelen and Lepore (2007,
ch. 9) and Gómez-Torrente (2013). I agree with the criticism, but I believe that its target is at bottom not
the notion of structure, as I shall try to show next.
14 Incidentally, homomorphism is the central notion of standard approaches to compositionality by the
so-called Montagovian school [see the original work by Montague (1974); an up-to-date version is found
in Hendriks (2001)].
15 This point is consistently made by Pagin and Westerståhl (2010a), and it applies equally well to other
related arguments known under diverse labels such as learnability, productivity, systematicity—cf. also
Maier’s (2014) discussion of quotation in connection with compositionality and productivity, and Sections
5 and 6 of Werning (2005).
16 Pagin and Westerståhl (2010a) also show that compositionality and computability are in fact independent
notions [cf. Section 5 of Werning (2005) for an argument for the independence of compositionality and
productivity]. The semantics of pure quotation presented here is both compositional and computable (and
productive).

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Pure quotation, metalanguage and metasemantics 131

the elements of a finite grammar into a set of unstructured semantic values is trivially
computable.
The problem for semantic computability in the case of quotation is that the number
of unstructured quotable items is not finite, since the set E of expressions is (again
reasonably) assumed to be infinite (and every e ∈ E is associated with a quotable e
∈ Q 17 ), which fact makes their semantic values uncomputable without the help of
some other effective rule.
The conclusion so far is that the understandability argument is associated not with
semantic structure, but with semantic computability.
In the theory proposed here the problem does not arise, because speakers are able to
understand a quotation expression that they never saw or heard before simply by fol-
lowing the effective rule made explicit by (5). Even though the number of quotations
is indeed infinite, their semantic values are given with the help of an identity func-
tion, which is in turn one of the standard basic computable functions of arithmetic.18
Therefore μ(κ(e)) is computable for any quotable e.
The theory is thus not only compositional, but also semantically computable, even
though quotations are semantically unstructured.
As a final remark, one could even want to introduce a (non-surjective19 ) presenta-
tional function π : E → Q such that we have π(e) = e for every e ∈ E, and then
ascertain that the rule is at bottom as follows:

μ(κ(π(e))) = μ| Eq ◦ (μ| Eq )−1 (π(e)) = π(e) = e

The justification for the syntactic unstructuredness of quotations would then be less
obvious (though not particularly difficult; cf. Sect. 8), since these latter would involve
a (cross-domain, but not syntactic) operation π over a syntactic expression e.
It seems, however, that we would only need such a function π if we assumed that
speakers are acquainted (in the usual Russellian sense) with presentational forms only
through the mediation of representational forms, for in that case we would only get
access to e through the application of π to e. Nevertheless, the hypothesis that speakers
have direct access to presentational forms appears much more plausible. Indeed, the
most immediate experience that speakers acquire from written or spoken sentences
comes from the very materiality of these sentences.
Speakers seem thus to be immediately exposed to (and thereby acquainted with) the
presentational forms of utterances, and if so, in the case of quotations they need not
even grasp representational roles in order to make sense of sentences with a quotational
constituent—as is made clear through examples such as the one in fn. 19.

17 And this is so a fortiori if we further assume that ill-formed expressions of the language at issue (see fn.
19), and even other sorts of signs such as drawings and phonetic notations are also quotables.
18 Obviously, we are not dealing with any arithmetical model in the present context, but it should suffice
for the reader to notice that identity functions remain computable when we shift from a domain of natural
numbers to one of expressions—identity functions operate likewise regardless of the nature of the elements
in their domains.
19 Not every quotable has an analogous expression in the language at stake, because not every quotable qual-
ifies as a well-formed expression. For example, “ ‘surepseH’ is the reverse of ‘Hesperus’ ” is a meaningful
English sentence, but “ ‘surepseH’ is an English word” is false.

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132 A. Bazzoni

5 Cappelen and Lepore’s Minimal theory

The essential point of preserving compositionality and semantic computability in the

above framework is making precise the fact that a quotation ‘ ‘e’ ’ does not refer to
the “quoted expression” ‘e’, as it is commonly put by Cappelen and Lepore (2007) in
connection with their Minimal theory of quotation. A quotation does not refer to any
expression at all, but rather to a quotable.
To be fair, Cappelen and Lepore’s elaboration of their theory features already at
some points explicit statements about that distinction, as in the passage below (Cap-
pelen and Lepore 2007, p. 151, italics in the original):

According to the Minimal Theory, quotation expressions contain as constituents

their semantic values—namely, quotable items are constituents of the quotation
expressions that quote them.

Moreover, the Minimal theory takes as its unique axiom the following identity-like
scheme (Cappelen and Lepore 2007, pp. 123–24):

(QS) ‘ ‘e’ ’ quotes ‘e’

(where ‘e’ is replaceable by any quotable item).

Notice that the constituents of a quotation are explicitly said to be semantic values
in the first excerpt, which is the essential point of the distinction. However, it seems
to me that this distinction is not transparent enough to their minds, as is made clear
by the immediately subsequent statement (ibid.):

But if quotation expressions contain what they quote as constituents, it follows

that if a quotation expression quotes a sign, then that sign must be a constituent
of that quotation expression; and if it quotes an expression, then that expression
must be a constituent of that quotation expression.

Now Cappelen and Lepore end up saying that an expression (or a sign, but this
distinction is not relevant here20 ) may be a constituent of a quotation expression,
which is precisely what we do not wish to assume. They should have kept holding
that the semantic value of “that expression must be a constituent of that quotation
expression.”
This kind of indecision about acknowledging the role of quotables as semantic
objects is frequent in Cappelen and Lepore’s book. Let me briefly present some other
examples. They write in p. 25:

20 As an example of the distinction, they consider (pp. 150–151) ‘red’, which is an expression both in
English and in Norwegian, and they point out that these two different expressions are different articulations
of one and the same sign, namely the sign ‘red’. According to them, both signs and expressions are quotable
items. It is not entirely clear to me whether the authors understand the concept of a sign in the same way
as quotables are defined in the context of our discussion—they also write (p. 150) that “[s]igns in general
are not language-specific and lack meaning,” which is a point of contact between signs and quotables—,
but the fact that they consider that expressions may be constituents of quotation expressions is sufficient
for rejecting their thesis.

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Pure quotation, metalanguage and metasemantics 133

Compare the relationship between the quotation expression ‘ “Quine” ’ and its
semantic value, namely, the name ‘Quine’, with the relationship between the
latter and its semantic value, namely, the great American philosopher of the
twentieth century.

The semantic value of a quotation, however, is not a name, but a quotable.

In the same spirit (p. 157):

[…] a quotation expression that contains an expression, say, the name for the
capital of Spain, as its constituent.

A quotation expression does not contain a name, it contains a quotable as its con-
stituent.
They shortly after make a statement entirely in harmony with the present theory
(p. 159):

A consequence of accepting the Minimal Theory […] is the surprising result that
quotation expressions contain their semantic values as constituents.

And four lines below:

Key to the solution is to see that quotation expressions can quote not only expres-
sions but also signs.

Again, quotation expressions do not quote expressions (nor perhaps signs), they
quote quotables.
These examples suggest that Cappelen and Lepore were probably trying to transmit
us the idea that their theory is essentially the one that has been advanced here, but they
did not systematically and formally single out the syntactic and the semantic realms
as we did in the last section above, which might be the reason why they were unable
to disentangle the confusion between an expression qua syntactic and an expression
qua semantic object. As a consequence, they were forced toward a distinct path from
the one that we have just trodden.
To see why, let us come back to the understandability argument in connection with
Cappelen–Lepore’s account.
Gómez-Torrente (2013) calls attention to an anomalous feature of their Minimal
theory related to their claim that “quotations are not unstructured” (Cappelen and Lep-
ore 2007, p. 103). According to Gómez-Torrente, this leaves insufficiently addressed,
among others, the issue of compositionality in that theory.
The reason why Cappelen and Lepore postulate semantic structure in quotation
expressions is that otherwise it would be difficult to handle the understandability
argument without incurring the old problem faced by Proper Name theories.
Specifically, if QS does provide us with a general rule for figuring out the refer-
ent of a pure-quotation expression, and on the other hand if the latter is semantically
unstructured, then its semantic value should be seen as conventionally given, just as
in the case of lexical items, which is in turn the whole trouble with Proper Name
theories. Gómez-Torrente goes on to object that the Minimal theory leaves mysteri-

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134 A. Bazzoni

ously underspecified the way in which QS reveals the semantic structure of quotation
expressions.
The contribution of the theory developed here as to the Minimal theory may be
viewed as a solution to that mystery, but with that mystery being stated otherwise than
in terms of structure—as we have seen, it would be more accurately stated in terms
of semantic computability. To put it as a question: How do rules like QS and our (4)
above reveal the way speakers compute the semantic value of quotation expressions?
The answer is then straightforward. Once we realize that quotables are unstructured
semantic objects,21 the next natural step is to lay down the transparent computable
rule given by (5).
Cappelen and Lepore were unable to unveil their mystery, it seems to me, because
they failed to unambiguously postulate quotable items as semantic objects.

6 Potts’ theory

In his article (Potts 2007), Potts develops a theory of quotation closely connected to
the Minimal theory. He writes about his theory (p. 412):
Since we can define properties of linguistic objects […] and modifiers of such
expressions […] we have the means for talking about the compositional seman-
tics of this realm.
Notice in this passage the reference to ‘linguistic objects’—quite in the spirit of the
approach to quotation defended here, if we take ‘objects’ to refer to semantic items—,
as well as the presence of the problematic term ‘expressions’.
Potts thus explicitly holds that his semantics is compositional. However, Pagin and
Westerståhl (2010b) still object that his framework is not compositional. They single
out, to begin with, a category of approaches to pure quotation intimately connected
to the standard Disquotational theories—whereof the Minimal theory and Potts’ own
treatment are improved versions—, and which they call straightforward theories. They
write (Pagin and Westerståhl 2010b, p. 382, their emphases):
A straightforward account of (the use of quote marks in) pure quotation is one
which (a) takes the quoted phrase to be a syntactic constituent of the quoting
phrase (the quoted phrase surrounded by quote marks), and (b) allows at least
one case of two syntactically distinct and quotable expressions having the same
semantic interpretation (meaning).
They further point out that the conjunction of (a) and (b) makes these straightfor-
ward theories of pure quotation inevitably non-compositional. The reason is the same
as the one introduced above: failure of substitutivity. Indeed, if (from (a)) the syntax
of the quoted expression effectively contributes to the semantic value of the quotation
expression, then we may have μ(κ(e1 )) = μ(κ(e2 )) even if we have (by (b)) e1 = e2
and μ(e1 ) = μ(e2 ), which constitutes a violation of substitutivity.

21 I disregard here the operation of concatenation of graphic signs, for the sake of simplicity—it would
arguably add nothing substantial to the analysis.

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Pure quotation, metalanguage and metasemantics 135

As reported by Pagin and Westerståhl, Potts replied (by personal communication)

to their observation by pointing out that (Pagin and Westerståhl 2010b, p. 384) “he
required no more than that ‘the syntax and the semantics work together in tandem’.”
Pagin and Westerståhl insist, however, that such an in-tandem proviso is too vague,
whereas their substitutivity argument is precise and conclusive enough.
What is then happening?
It seems to me that both sides have their points. If Potts’ theory really is straightfor-
ward in Pagin–Westerståhl’s sense, then failure of compositionality follows indeed.
On the other hand, Potts’ words about syntax and semantics working in tandem,
although it is surely too vague, indicate that he did not perhaps intend his theory to be
straightforward.
It was shown above that Cappelen and Lepore’s Minimal theory is unclear about
the place of quoted items in the formal framework. This seems to be the case of Potts’
as well.
The point at which those accounts may or may not range among straightforward
theories is item (a) of Pagin and Westerståhl’s quoted passage above—item (b) is
quite uncontroversial, at least for our present purposes.
We notice at once that the semantics outlined in Sect. 3 above is not straightforward,
and the reason is that, contrary to (a) and as we have stressed before, quoted phrases
are not in that theory syntactic constituents of the relevant quoting phrases. They are
syntactically atomic, hence they belong to the set E t of atomic expressions of our
grammar E.
Nevertheless, the further observation that such expressions are obtained through the
application of a cross-domain (in the explained sense) operation to a semantic object
(i.e., to a quotable) leads us to a possible interpretation of Potts’ in-tandem point of
view. He might be willing to say that he does not require that quoting phrases involve
an operation strictly inside the syntactic realm—as the α’s in —, but rather an in-
tandem operation between the syntactic and the semantic realms—as in the cases of
μ and κ.
As compared to the Minimal theory, Potts’ setting has the advantage of being
supported by a more explicit formal apparatus. On the other hand, his in-tandem
intentions seem to remain unclear even at the formal level of his theory, as we shall
now see.
The essential elements of Potts’ grammar are triples P = ; ; α : σ ,  being a
phonological representation,  a syntactic category, and α a semantic representation
of type σ .
Quotations are then introduced as elements of the kind ; ; P : u. We only
need to care in the context of our discussion about semantic representations, which
are in Potts’ setup the result of the application of the operation S E M to P.
We thus have according to Potts:
(19) ; ; P : u = S E M(; ; P : u) = P = P
where · interprets semantic representations—it is roughly the analogous of our
semantic function μ.
An important feature of (19) is the specification of the type u of P. This has as
a consequence the fact that P is constrained in Potts’ setting to belong to a set

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136 A. Bazzoni

Du , which as he explains “is the domain of well-formed linguistic entities” (p. 410).
It then follows from (19) that we have P ∈ Du .
Now Pagin and Westerståhl (2010b, p. 385, fn. 8) treat quotations in Potts’ frame-
work as the result of a syntactic operation. However, we have just seen that the target
of such operation (i.e., P) is a linguistic object that, according to Potts, belongs to
“the objects that support the model-theoretic interpretation of the semantic represen-
tations” (p. 410). As such, P is a semantic, not a syntactic object; and as such, an
operation over P cannot be a syntactic operation. At best, if not semantic either, it
may be cross-domain, as it seems to be the case in Potts’ formal apparatus. This is
probably the in-tandem sense intended by Potts.
On the other hand, Pagin and Westerståhl cannot be blamed for treating quotation
in Potts’ setup as a syntactic operation, since this operation is explicitly introduced
as such by Potts in the exposition of his grammar—see item (v) of the definition of
Potts’ grammar in p. 408 of his article.
The problem lies once again in an unclear treatment of quoted items. In Potts’
theory, as in Cappelen–Lepore’s, these items are treated somehow simultaneously as
syntactic and semantic objects.
For sure, they may separately play these two roles in different contexts, but the point
is that these roles do not overlap in pure quotation, in which only semantic objects
figure as arguments of the quote function. Pure quotation is a cross-domain, not a
syntactic operation.
In conclusion, Potts’ framework is (judging from his in-tandem motivations) not
intended as a straightforward treatment of quotation, and if it succeeded in not being
such, it could be perfectly compositional, just as the theory proposed in the present
paper is. However, Potts’ intention is not fully achieved due to his failure to unambigu-
ously treat quoted items as semantic objects. As a consequence, Pagin and Westerståhl
are right to point out that Potts’ theory cannot be compositional after all.
In what comes to Pagin and Westerståhl’s own theory, the first point to be stressed
is that they do not work with the standard version of compositionality. Instead, they
shift to a contextual version that incorporates a contextual argument in the semantic
function, in addition to the standard syntactic argument for expressions. In this way,
they treat quotation as linguistic context. The details of their framework would lead us
too far astray, so I shall limit myself to the observation that the same kind of indecision
about the nature of quoted items can also be found in Pagin–Westerståhl’s work. To
give an example, they first write (Pagin and Westerståhl 2010b, p. 383):

[…] quote marks are a productive and transparent device for forming names of
linguistic entities, names that refer to those entities in just the same way as other
names refer to non-linguistic entities.

which is very much in the spirit of the account proposed here.

However, this is not in the spirit of “the straightforward view that quotation is a
syntactic operation” (Pagin and Westerståhl 2010b, p. 384), which is urged shortly
later in the same paper—whose overall strategy is then, instead of giving up the
straightforward treatment altogether, to give up standard compositionality in favor of
a contextual version of the principle.

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Pure quotation, metalanguage and metasemantics 137

7 Gómez-Torrente’s theory

The two theories that we have just examined partake, though somewhat reluctantly,
the view that in some way the semantics of quotation expressions should be described
according to the basic intuition that quotations refer to their quoted items. The problem
is that the specification of the nature of these items turns out to be crucial to the clar-
ification of other important features of quotation. As regards Cappelen and Lepore’s
Minimal theory, we have seen that they were led to the conclusion that quotations are
structured; and in the case of Potts’ theory, Pagin and Westerståhl showed that it is
not compositional in a standard sense. We have seen that these aspects of these two
theories may (and perhaps must) be explained by the irresolute determination of the
nature of quoted items.
A further comment is worth making regarding Cappelen–Lepore’s and Potts’ the-
ories. There is obviously no a priori theoretical constraint preventing structural and
non-compositional analyses of quotation expressions. I follow here Gómez-Torrente
(2013) in observing that when some theory presents anomalous side effects with
respect to other standard treatments (be these about the same subject or, even worse,
about more general topics involving the specific subject of the theory), we should
prefer another theory (if any) that has the same advantages of the first, and from which
the anomalous features do not ensue.
Gómez-Torrente points out such a feature in the Minimal theory, as we have seen
above. As to Potts’ theory, one obvious anomaly stems from the observation by Pagin
and Westerståhl (2010b) that Potts’ semantics is recursive (or equivalently, com-
putable), but not compositional. As the same authors also point out elsewhere (in
Pagin and Westerståhl 2010a), “[s]tandard semantic theories are typically both recur-
sive and compositional.” Therefore, the least that we should expect from a theory
such as Potts’ is that it explains22 why it deviates from so a general aspect of standard
semantic theories.
As we have also seen, the present theory qualifies as an alternative treatment to
those two which respects their basic idea, and in addition eludes their anomalous
side effects. Gómez-Torrente’s approach to pure quotation also seems to qualify,
and indeed, it is to my knowledge the closest treatment to the one proposed in this
paper.23
The basic idea is the same, and it is a version of Cappelen–Lepore’s QS axiom
scheme, which Gómez-Torrente calls the Interiority Principle (Gómez-Torrente 2013,
p. 370):

(Interiority Principle) A quotation refers to the expression within its quotation

marks.

22 Which in fact it does not, for the obvious reason that Potts believes his semantics to be compositional.
23 Although Gómez-Torrente’s theory, as we shall see, must be eventually rejected, it has the merits of
highlighting the disquotational method and the unstructuredness aspect of pure quotation, which are both
fundamental to the theory presented here.

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138 A. Bazzoni

Notice that we have already an explicit mention to the problematic term ‘expression’
in Interiority.24
Yet, in spite of its rejection of the thesis that pure quotations are semantically com-
plex, Gómez-Torrente’s theory still appears to postulate an (apparently less serious)
deviant aspect with respect to standard linguistic theories. What I find puzzling (and
even mysterious, to borrow his own criticism of the Minimal theory) in his account is
his view that (p. 370)
Interiority exploits the fact that quotations are morphologically complex, con-
sisting of the left quotation mark, the quoted expression and the right quotation
mark (in that order), and assigns a referent to a quotation as a function of the
identity of one of its morphological components, the quoted expression […]
Now it becomes clearer, it seems to me, that Gómez-Torrente is also inclined to
take quoted items to be expressions qua syntactic terms after all.25
To begin with, he believes quotations to be morphologically complex, two elements
being involved in such a compound, namely the quotation marks and the quoted item.
If morphology is to be taken as usual, however, it is impossible for a morphologically
complex expression to have as one of its constituents a semantic item. Therefore, the
quoted item must be eventually understood as a syntactic expression. If so, it becomes
intriguing to think how Gómez-Torrente can postulate at the same time semantic
unstructuredness and morphological structuredness for quotation expressions, and
hold that “their morphological structure is no guide to their semantic structure” (fn.
36, p. 372).
A possibility is that morphology constitutes in Gómez-Torrente’s theory an anom-
alous field as compared to the standard study of morphemes.26
Indeed, suppose again morphology is understood as usual. Then if quotation marks
are morphological constituents of a quotation expression, it follows that they must be
semantically relevant. Accordingly, if the quoted item is a morphological constituent

24 Gómez-Torrente is aware of the importance of attributing the term ‘expression’ a more precise sense—he
observes shortly after stating the interiority principle that (p. 373)
[o]ur presumable implicit grasp of the Interiority rule requires that we have an understanding of the
general notion of an expression that appears in its formulation […]
25 Although, as in the cases of Cappelen–Lepore and Potts, there are some ambivalent passages in his text
as to that matter, for example when he writes that “a quotation […] refers to the thing inside its quotes”
(p. 372). What is a thing? Is it syntactic, semantic? He also stresses that “the denotation of an expression
that is the concatenation of the left-hand quotation mark with an expression e with the right-hand quotation
mark is the expression e” (pp. 372–373). However, that denotation is rather the quotable e. Incidentally,
Washington (1992, p. 582) also states, and also without any further precision, that “quotation is a way
of mentioning things.” We find in Washington’s article various examples of the same sort of indecision
between syntactic and semantic entities, also with an overall inclination towards the former.
26 To be sure, morphology is a convenient place to put anomalies into, since it is the most irregular and
controversial level of linguistic analysis as compared to the traditional triad syntax–semantics–pragmatics.
It seems thus convenient to push structural anomaly away into the mess. However, this will not do in the
present case, because we are dealing with a highly (perhaps the only) uncontroversial feature of morphology,
namely the semantic significance of its units, called morphemes. Indeed, morphemes are by definition the
minimal units of form and meaning of a language, and there seems to be no standard way of understanding
morphemes without appealing to their semantics.

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Pure quotation, metalanguage and metasemantics 139

of a quotation, then it must be semantically relevant. In addition, the semantics of the

quotation expression cannot be given only by the semantics of the quotation marks, oth-
erwise every quotation would be attributed the same semantic value; and the semantics
of the quotation expression cannot be given only by the semantics of the quoted item,
because the quoted item is (in this view) a syntactic expression whose semantic value is
not the semantic value of the quotation expression—which fact indeed constitutes the
whole peculiarity of pure quotation. Therefore, the semantics of the quotation expres-
sion must be given by some combination of both the semantics of quotation marks and
the semantics of the quoted expression. But then, quotation expressions are semanti-
cally structured. Given that one of the central aims of Gómez-Torrente is, however,
precisely to conceive of a semantic apparatus having it that quotation expressions are
semantically unstructured, it seems that morphology must present some anomalous
feature according to his theory.
Gómez-Torrente has advanced an important further step as regards Cappelen–
Lepore’s and Potts’ theories through postulating semantic unstructuredness. However,
he eventually pushed the trouble into the morphologic level. Actually, it sufficed for
him to simply postulate no structure for quotations altogether, be it at the morphologic,
syntactic, or semantic levels. Again, what seems to have prevented this full conclusion
was the failure to unambiguously state the semantic nature of quoted items.

8 Quotation and complexity

The unstructuredness of quotation expressions makes them similar to names in lan-

guages. But Gómez-Torrente (2013) also stresses that what moves him away from the
Proper Name theory is the fact that a quotation is not exactly a name.
What distinguishes the theory of pure quotation proposed here from (to my knowl-
edge) all the preceding ones, however, is that it takes really seriously the fact that
quoted items are semantic objects. This allowed us to elude not only the classical
Davidsonian criticisms of the Proper Name theory [cf. Gómez-Torrente (2013) for a
more detailed and illuminating discussion], but also the problem faced by recent theo-
ries following the same strategy of proposing general ‘identity’—not to be confounded
with the general precepts of the Use theory—rules for the operation of reference-fixing
in connection with pure-quotation expressions—e.g., Cappelen–Lepore’s QS, Potts’
rule given by (19), Gómez-Torrente’s Interiority Principle, and my own (5).
From the analyses of such theories above, one can detect a salient common ele-
ment of resistance when it comes to the nature of that operation of reference-fixing.
There seemed indeed to be a worry (less explicit in the case of Potts) about structure
surrounding those theorists. They seemed to be all the time reminding themselves that
once we realize that quotations are somewhat similar to, but not exactly as names,
the key to the distinction between both must be structure, which observation then
compelled them to the task of searching for structure at some linguistic level.
In fact, it may be puzzling to be told, as were the readers of the above lines, that
quotation expressions have no structure at all at any level, and that yet, we are able to
figure out their semantic value just by their very form. Those same readers were also
told that to understand how it can be so, we must stop thinking about structure and

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seek instead the explanation in the notion of computability. Since this point is crucial,
let us develop it from the viewpoint of linguistic complexity.
There is no complexity at all involved in ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’. It is not morphologically
built up from quotation marks together with ‘Hesperus’, for if we remove the quotation
marks from ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’, we are left with the expression ‘Hesperus’. The quotation ‘
‘Hesperus’ ’, however, is not built up from the expression ‘Hesperus’, but rather from
the quotable Hesperus. To put it differently, if one removes the quotation marks from
‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’, what one is left with is an element belonging not to the language, but
to the world. Therefore, one cannot linguistically separate the quoted item from its
quotation marks without ‘breaking down’ language.
It follows immediately that ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ is not syntactically complex either. This
is less obvious in the case of quoted phrases like ‘ ‘In the garden’ ’.27 Is there syntactic
complexity now? The answer is again ‘no’. What is inside the quotation marks is still
a quotable. The only difference between the quotations ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ and ‘ ‘In the
garden’ ’ is that the quotable associated with the latter has blank marks in it. But these
blank marks are still part of the world, not of the language. In short, if we denote
syntactic blank marks by simple dots, and the quotable associated with a blank mark
by a boldface dot, then the quotable inside ‘ ‘In the garden’ ’ is written In.the.garden.
Both Inthegarden and In.the.garden are quotables, but only ‘In.the.garden’, and not
‘Inthegarden’, is an expression.
Finally, ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ is not semantically complex either, because otherwise its
semantic value should be somewhat determined with the help of the semantic values
of the quotation marks and the quoted item. The latter, however, is a quotable, which
is meaningless.
Is there really no complexity at any linguistic level involved in pure-quotation
expressions?
The answer is: no more than in proper names. The operations of naming and quoting
are of the same nature: we map some entity of the semantic domain into a syntactic
expression. The way in which this operation is accomplished, however, is different: in
the case of proper names, the operation is arbitrary, whereas in the case of quotation,
a strict method is at work.
We cannot quote the quotable Hesperus in any arbitrary way. We cannot label
Hesperus with the name ‘John’ in order to quote Hesperus—strictly speaking, we
can give Hesperus the name ‘John’, but then ‘John’ would be the name, not the
quotation of Hesperus. We cannot either ascribe the name ‘Hesperus’ to Hesperus in
order to quote Hesperus, because ‘Hesperus’ is the name of the planet Venus, which
is different from the ‘name’ of the quotable Hesperus. The latter is not a planet, but a
graphic sequence of letters. The quotation of Hesperus can only be ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’.28

27 The so-called Description theory of quotation, which is to a large extent a variant of the Proper Name
theory, follows this strategy by postulating an internal structure in phrases of that kind—cf. Geach (1957)
for the original elaboration of the idea, and Maier (2014) for a well-informed presentation of the advantages
and problems related to the theory.
28 In attacking the Minimal theory, Saka (2009) contends that there are various alternative ways of quoting
an expression, not only through quotation marks. This would mean in the present context that not only
‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ can quote Hesperus; so can Hesperus, for example. Manifestly enough, though, Saka’s
criticism is far beside the point. What is implied by the statement that only ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ quotes Hesperus

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One could still observe that in the present theory, a quotation ‘ ‘e’ ’ gets analyzed
as an operation κ over a quotable e, and that this could be understood as a kind of
complexity.
Of course, I do not in any way intend to restrict anyone’s conception of complexity.
However, if you are inclined to see in such an operation some kind of complexity, then
you will be forced to assume that proper names also have some kind of complexity. The
reason is that, as we have seen, although the specific operations are differently carried
out in the two cases, they share a common feature: both are cross-domain operations
from the semantic domain to the syntactic domain. In view of this ‘structural’ similarity,
one could postulate an analogous of κ to the case of proper names, for example the
naming function ν : M → E that gives for any m ∈ M, the name ν(m) of m in the
language E, and then conclude that proper names are complex in the same way that
pure quotations are.
Even if we see this as a kind of complexity, the crucial point is that the difference
between naming and quoting, i.e., between ν and κ, lies in the fact that only the latter
is computable—only quotation is associated with a general rule of reference-fixing.
Therefore, there is no mystery in the fact that quotations are unstructured expres-
sions, provided that we bear in mind that expressions of this kind need not all be
constructed in the same way. Is there any anomaly with this? As compared to theories of
languages without quotation, there surely is, just as an arbitrary naming procedure such
as ν would be anomalous with respect to theories of languages without proper names.
The upshot is that now anomaly does not reach the level of general linguistic principles,
and has therefore much more to do with particularity, than with anomaly proper.

9 Conclusion—general questions about quotation

Let us finally review, without going into unnecessary cumbersome details,29 some
classical issues about pure quotation, and see how the present theory deals with them.
To begin with more general matters, let us address the three questions proposed
by Washington (1992) as questions that any theory of quotation should be able to
answer. I shall follow Gómez-Torrente’s simpler formulation of those questions (see
Gómez-Torrente 2001, pp. 123–124). Since all of them were extensively examined
above, they will receive here brief answers by way of a summary of how the theory
presented here relates to the fundamental questions raised by quotation expressions,
and to standard approaches in the literature. The following lines will thus also function
as a Conclusion section.
The first question is: What is the referring component of a quotation expression?
As we have already seen, according to the present account it is the whole quotation
expression that does the referring, as in the Proper Name theory and contrary to the

Footnote 28 continued
is merely that, once the notation is fixed for the quote operation, then only this operation applied to Hesperus
can be used to quote Hesperus.
29 Since the majority of points are sufficiently and competently addressed by Cappelen and Lepore (2007)
and Gómez-Torrente (2013), whose theories share with the present one a great number of their general lines,
the reader will find in these works further and detailed discussions of the same issues treated in this section.

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142 A. Bazzoni

Demonstrative and Use theories, which postulate that such a function is carried out by
the quotation marks and the quoted expression, respectively.
The second question is: What type of object is referred to by the referring component
of a quotation expression? Unlike any other view (or at least any sufficiently explicit
account in this respect), in the present theory a pure quotation refers to a semantic
entity, a quotable. Standard approaches are reluctant about the nature of the objects
referred to by quotation expressions, frequently oscillating between a semantic and a
syntactic view, and most often suggesting an overall tendency to the latter.
Finally, the third question asks: How is the reference of the referring part deter-
mined? Unlike the Proper Name theory, and in agreement with many other views such
as the Minimal, Use and Interiority (i.e., Gómez-Torrente’s) theories, the reference of
pure-quotation expressions is determined by a general and semantically computable
rule, namely the one supplied by (5) above.
With this much said, we turn now to more specific issues about quotation. We fol-
low Cappelen and Lepore’s (2007) presentation consisting of separated items (plus
an additional one dealing with empty quotation) introducing central data about quo-
tation. Four (out of twelve) of the original items in Cappelen and Lepore’s book go
beyond pure quotations. Since we are only concerned with pure quotations here, I shall
assemble them in a unique section, in which I shall briefly discuss the more general
question of a unified account for any kind of quotation in natural languages.
Again, a number of the issues below were already tackled in the course of our
analysis above, so they will be only briefly summarized in what follows.

9.1 Opacity

We have seen that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, there is no opacity involved
in pure quotations. This is because, once acknowledged that pure quotations refer to
semantic entities, there is no sense in saying that two co-referential semantic entities
are interchangeable in any sentence salva veritate, for the straightforward reason that
semantic entities are never meaningful, let alone co-referential.

9.2 Quantifying in

This question is related to the preceding one. It deals with the impossibility of quan-
tifying into quotation, as exemplified by the following formula:
(20) ∃x[‘x’ has eight letters]
as obtained from (16) by existential generalization. As authors frequently observe,
any such ‘x’ will always have only one letter, making any existential generalization
like (20) false—for quoted items containing more than one letter. As we have already
emphasized, however, we cannot replace just ‘x’ in ‘ ‘x’ ’, because the latter is not
a complex expression. In order to operate an existential quantification over (16), we
must consider the whole quotation expression, as in:

∃x[x has eight letters]

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whereby ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’, and not just ‘Hesperus’, is existentially generalized by the

introduction of the variable x.

9.3 Infinitude

This issue is related to the understandability argument dealt with in Sect. 4 above: an
infinite cognitive capacity is required in order for speakers of a language to be able to
understand quotations, for these latter are not learned one by one.
As we have seen, though, understandability requires semantic computability, not
semantic structure, and we can thus have a semantics such as the one proposed in the
present paper in which pure quotations are unstructured, yet computable through the
recursive rule given by (5).

9.4 Extant lexicon

As Cappelen and Lepore (2007, p. 22) put it, “[q]uotation is not limited to an extant
lexicon or list of familiar symbols.” We can quote words from other languages; we can
quote “gibberish, i.e. combinations of linguistic items that don’t mean anything in any
natural language” (Cappelen and Lepore 2007, p. 23); we can quote drawings; we can
“even quote (basic) units that are not part of the language or the sign system” (ibid.).
Not every author is willing to accept the grammaticality of all those kinds of
quotations—e.g., Saka is not. The point is that the present theory is neutral in this
respect. It explains the liberal view in a straightforward way: if all those quoted items
are semantic entities, there is no a priori reason why they cannot be quotables, and
thus quoted.
On the other hand, of course, the restricted view according to which such quotations
produce ungrammatical sentences should then explain why this is so. One could refuse
to treat such items as semantic objects, which would be, indeed, a plausible suggestion
in the context of such theories—those are not items possibly referred to by elements
of a language. One could also suggest that not every presentational form is a quotable.
At any rate, the present theory does not seem to depend on a definitive answer to this
question, nor to the problem of the extant lexicon in general.

9.5 The proximity constraint

A theory of quotation must account for the fact that ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ is very closely
related to its referent, whereas ‘Hesperus’ is not. Cappelen and Lepore (2007, p. 24)
propose to explain it by taking literally the fact that quotations contain the quoted
item. This would, however, indicate that the quoted item is a syntactic expression.
Therefore, their solution must be rejected in our present context.
The explanation offered here is less literal in this respect, and is again given by (5).
One direct way of stating it is by saying that ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ refers to the quotable that
is the presentational form associated with ‘Hesperus’, through the application of an
identity function. On the other hand, since ‘Hesperus’ is not a quotation expression,
the identity function provided by rule (5) just fails to apply to it.

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The formal argument is worth spelling out in more detail.

As an anonymous referee pointed out to me, the problem may be stated in terms
of the seemingly analyticity (or necessity, or a priority, depending on how one defines
these terms) of (22), as opposed to (11)—repeated below as (21)—, whose truth
crucially depends on the name that is actually given to Hesperus.
(21) ‘Hesperus’ refers to Hesperus.
(22) ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’ refers to ‘Hesperus’.

To say that (22) is analytic is to say that its truth depends on its meaning alone, thus
for us to be able to understand why that sentence appears to be analytic, it is useful to
spell out the meaning of the reference relation ‘refers to’.
Intuitively, where R M is the extension (with respect to M) of ‘refers to’, and
a, b are objects of the underlying domain of individuals, to say that (a, b) ∈ R M
means that b is the referent of an expression e whose presentational form is a. That
is, the reference relation is semantically a relation between (two semantic objects):
the presentational form of an expression and the object that is the referent of that
expression.30
We can thus write e as −1 (a),31 where  : E → Q E is a presentational function
whose codomain Q E ⊂ Q is restricted to the set of quotables that are in fact the
presentational forms of expressions of the underlying language—so that , unlike π
from Sect. 4, is bijective and has a well-defined inverse −1 . Therefore, to say that
(a, b) ∈ R M means that we have:
(23) μ(−1 (a)) = b.
Now let us apply (23) to (22), so that we take a := ‘Hesperus’, and b := Hesperus.
We thus have (22) true if and only if (‘Hesperus’, Hesperus) ∈ R M , which means
that we have:

μ(−1 (‘Hesperus’)) = Hesperus

But we also have that −1 (‘Hesperus’) = κ(Hesperus), which yields:
(24) μ(κ(Hesperus)) = Hesperus.
By (5) we have μ(κ(Hesperus)) = id(Hesperus), hence finally, to say that we
have (‘Hesperus’, Hesperus) ∈ R M means that we have:

id(Hesperus) = Hesperus
which is a logical truth. Therefore, (22) is analytic.
Now applying the same procedure to (21), we take a := Hesperus, and b := h M ,
where h M is the object of the domain whose name is h, which stands for Hesperus.

30 This object b may itself be a presentational form if the respective expression (referring to b) is also a
quotation, as in the case of (22); but it need not be so, as shows (21)—cf. (25) below. In contrast, a is always
a presentational form (cf. fn. 9).
31 We have (e) = a.

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The sentence will thus be true (in the underlying model) if and only if (Hesperus, h) ∈
R M , which means that we have:

μ(−1 (Hesperus)) = h M

Therefore, to say that we have (Hesperus, h M ) ∈ R eventually means that we

have:
(25) μ(h) = h M
which is synthetic,32 for its truth crucially relies on the non-logical fact that h is the
name of h M in the underlying model.33
To state it briefly, ‘ ‘Hesperus’ ’—i.e., κ(Hesperus)—is indeed very closely related
to its referent, for the referent of κ(Hesperus) is its argument Hesperus. In contrast,
‘Hesperus’ is not related to its referent, which by application of the non-computable,
conventionally characterizable function μ, is a planet.

9.6 Ambiguity

In mentioning Saka’s version of the Use theory [see e.g. Saka (1998, 2005, 2006)],
we observed that it is committed to a kind of ambiguity related to the reference of
quotation expressions.
Not every theorist agrees with Saka—Cappelen and Lepore do not (see Cappelen
and Lepore 1999, 2007). Without going any deeper into this matter, I shall only point
out that, as in the case of the extant lexicon problem, the present theory is neutral in
this respect. If quotation expressions are ambiguous in Saka’s sense, this just means
that there are different kinds of semantic entities that qualify as quotables, and as such,
as referents of quotation expressions. If not, no issue arises. The point lies not in the
semantics of pure quotation, but in the characterization of quotables.

9.7 Iterability

Any pure-quotation expression ‘ ‘e’ ’ can get quotation marks to form the pure-
quotation expression ‘ ‘ ‘e’ ’ ’. This is the phenomenon of quotation iteration, and
any theory of pure quotation should be able to explain it.
The reader is by now familiar with the theory defended here, and (s)he is thus
in a position to see that the issue is presented in a misleading way. Quotables, and
not expressions, get quotation marks to form a quotation expression. Iteration is in a
sense possible from this perspective simply because the quotable associated with a

32 Since the argument of μ is not a quotation, we cannot apply (5) to (25) as we could in the case of (24).
33 In this particular case where we have a proper name in our sentence, we encounter the standard problems
related to the definitions of ‘analytic’, ‘necessary’ and ‘a priori’, but we need not put too much emphasis on
this kind of discussion here, since we are not concerned with any specific definition of those terms, or with
the semantic treatment of proper names. We could simply substitute ‘the star that shines in the evening’
for ‘Hesperus’ in the sentences above, the crucial point here being merely to explain the intuitive semantic
difference between sentences of the kinds of (21) and (22).

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146 A. Bazzoni

quotation expression can be quoted just as any other quotable. Therefore, ‘Hesperus’
is a quotable on the same terms as Hesperus. In a strict sense, however, iteration is
not possible. In so-called ‘quotation iteration’ there is no syntactic iteration, hence
no semantic iteration is needed. The way in which we calculate the semantic value of
‘ ‘ ‘e’ ’ ’ is by applying rule (5) only once, thus obtaining ‘e’ from μ(κ(‘e’)). Quotation
iteration, in the sense in which it is possible at all, works by application of the quote
function κ to a quotable containing quotes qua quotables, not quotes qua expressions.
Maier (2014) argues that theories of quotation should adequately deal with semantic
iteration along with syntactic iteration. This means that the theory should be able to
account not only for the formation of an iterated quotation as in a scheme of the
kind q(q(. . . q(. . . ) . . . ))—where q is a syntactic operator that takes an expression
and gives the quotation of that expression—, but also for the semantic value of the
quotation expression by correspondingly iterating the semantic function, according
to a scheme of the form of μ(μ(. . . μ(. . . ) . . . )). Neither the Proper Name nor the
Demonstrative theories, as shown by Maier, adequately address the issue, for they
present iterated quotation as a matter of syntactic iteration (i.e. respectively, as the
name of the name of …of the name of an expression; and as the demonstration of
the demonstration of …of the demonstration of an expression). In the present theory,
however, for reasons that we have just reviewed, semantic iteration does not even arise
as a desideratum—an iterated quotation is in reality merely a quotation of a ‘quoted
quotable’ (i.e., a quotable containing quotes qua quotables).

9.8 Quotation without quotation marks

This issue was discussed in detail in Sect. 2.2. We saw there that without the assumption
that quotation marks are implicitly or explicitly present in quotation expressions, we
cannot answer Washington/Gómez-Torrente’s questions the way we did.
The answer to the first could not have been that it is the whole quotation expression
(i.e., quoted item plus quotation marks) that does the referring in pure quotations,
because the quoted item is the whole expression in a QWQ approach.
Likewise, the answer to the second question could not have been that pure quotations
refer to quotables, because without quotation marks quoted items must be expressions,
hence syntactical elements—quoted items are direct constituents of the respective
sentences in a QWQ approach. But the crucial point of the present theory is that
quoted items are not syntactic expressions.
Finally, the answer to the third question could not have been that quotations refer
by means of rule (5), because this rule states that the referent of a pure quotation
is a quotable, and without quotation marks we are unable to distinguish between a
quotation expression and a quotable.

9.9 Empty quotation

This is a novel matter to our discussion.

Sorensen (2008) pointed out the possibility of the empty quotation, that is, of quoting
the empty item—see Saka (2011) for a criticism of Sorensen’s view; Gómez-Torrente

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Pure quotation, metalanguage and metasemantics 147

(2001, p. 130) [cf. also Gómez-Torrente (2010) for other criticisms of Sorensen’s
article] had already held the view that the empty quotation is ungrammatical. Sorensen
observes in the beginning of his article that

[…] we can subtract our way to the empty string:

1) ‘Io’ has two characters
2) ‘I’ has one character
3) ‘’ has no characters

It is important to notice, as urged by Sorensen, that the quotation in the last sentence
does not quote a string of blanks, but rather the empty string. As a consequence, the
sentence is not the same as the following:
3∗ ) ‘ ’ has no characters
The quotation now contains one blank character, so it does not have no charac-
ters. Therefore, whereas 3) is true, 3∗ ) is false—only the former features the empty
quotation.
Sorensen stresses that the possibility of the empty quotation undermines a large
number of standard theories of quotation, including the Proper Name and the Use
theories, as well as Davidson’s version of the Demonstrative theory—see Gómez-
Torrente (2010) for a criticism.
The question is at bottom whether quoting the empty string yields a grammatical
expression, or not. And once again, the present theory is compatible with both answers
to that question.
If the empty quotation were deemed ungrammatical, we could say that this is
because the empty string is not a semantic entity, or at least not a quotable—this
seems to be Gómez-Torrente’s point (cf. Gómez-Torrente 2010, p. 441). If otherwise,
it would suffice to make sense of the empty string as a legitimate quotable. Nonetheless,
this is not a task for any theory of quotation to undertake. The theory would only be
required, in case the theorist is willing to accept the empty string as the quoted item
in the empty quotation, to make sense of the empty string as an object of the semantic
universe.34
This is an exciting matter worth investigating in depth, but whether or not it is a
legitimate phenomenon does not interfere in the validity of the theory of pure quotation
proposed here.

9.10 Other kinds of quotation

Here comes what seems to be the most delicate matter as regards the generality of the
present account of pure quotation. To what extent can it be generalized to any kind of
quotation expressions?

34 So stated, such a justification would not seem that hard to be worked out, since the empty string could
be theoretically treated as it is in set theory and mathematics in general, in whose frameworks the notion of
emptiness plays a crucial role, as observed by Sorensen. The point, however, is to make sense of the empty
string in relation to grammaticality in natural languages, which is a far from trivial matter.

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148 A. Bazzoni

Recanati treats quotation as a general phenomenon of linguistic demonstration, one

of whose particular manifestations is pure quotation, which he in turn classifies among
the cases of closed quotations (Recanati 2001, p. 649). He complains that philosophers
usually concentrate their efforts on closed quotation while neglecting other important
and pervasive uses of quotation in language, assembled by him under the label of open
quotations. According to him, such a neglect is responsible for bad theorizing.
We have already seen some cases of non-pure quotations in the Introduction section
above. The most emblematic one in the literature is the following example of what is
commonly called a mixed quotation:

Quine says that quotation ‘has a certain anomalous feature’

An extensive analysis of Recanati’s claim would lead us far beyond our topic here,
namely pure quotation, so let me only make two brief comments on it.
First, I am not convinced that a theory of quotation must take care of all cases of
quotation—neither are Cappelen and Lepore, and they even claim that Recanati does
not attempt any unified account of quotation after all (cf. Cappelen and Lepore 2007,
sect. 4.2.1). There seems to be no a priori reason why quotation marks should behave
semantically along exactly the same lines in all of its manifestations.
Second, I cannot see why a specific study of pure quotation (if adequately pursued),
which would have as its object of investigation a particular manifestation of a general
phenomenon (incidentally, this is how scientific knowledge most often progresses),
could be harmful to a unified theory, if any. If bad theorizing there is, I do not believe
that it is necessarily due to any lack of general perspective, but more probably to bad
theorizing on its own right with respect to the very particular subject at issue.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions and
thoughtful comments on previous versions of the present article. This work is partly supported by FAPESP.

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