Quote Imperatives - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

2.2 A presuppositional analysis of mix quotesGeurts and Maier (2003)(13) George said that Tony “misunderestimates me”≈ George said that Tony has the property he refers to as ‘misunderestimatesme’• mixed quotation triggers a presupposition– presupposition: George used the expression ‘misunderestimatesme’ to express some property– assertion: George says that Tony has that property• formalization:– presupposition framework: DRT+PA∗ construction stage: G couples forms with PrelDRSs(L = PrelDRS language (with types, lambdas, and (unresolved/insitu) presuppositions)∗ resolution stage: context DRS ⊕ PrelDRS → output DRS– ternary relation express∗ express(x, 〈misunderestimates me . . .〉, X)≈ x uses string misunderestimates me to refer to X• (Geurts and Maier 2003; Maier 2008, 2009:cf.)Mixed quotation• add composition rule (mixed quotation): 1⎡〈“ ∩ σ ∩ ⎢”, ⎣XXexpress(y, 〈σ, ϕ, τ〉, X)⎤〉⎥⎦ , τ〈σ, ϕ, τ〉Example• stage 1: construction 231 Here, double quotes denote mixed quotation, single quotes denote pure quotation.Dashed boxes denote presuppositions (van der Sandt 1992)2 G-triples now represented vertically, with round instead of angled brackets3 The y in express(y〈. . .〉 . . .) should really be a presupposition as well6