Quotations and the Intrusion of Non-linguistic Communication into Utterances

Abstract

When linguists or philosophers of language study communication, they are naturally biased towards linguistic communication. This has resulted in a situation in which very little attention is being paid to the fact that many of our daily utterances are actually a mixture between linguistic and other expressive means, such as noises, gestures and facial expressions. It is precisely on this phenomenon that I wish to focus. I show how Clark & Gerrig’s notion of demonstration can be usefully applied to intrusions of non-linguistic material into spoken or written utterances. Although I agree with relevance theorists that the linguistic bias should be abandoned, I am led to propose an account of non-linguistic demonstrations as linguistic constituents, at least in the particular category of data that I examine, namely utterances in which some gesturing appears to stand in for a missing linguistic constituent. In those cases, I contend, non-linguistic demonstrations are recruited to fulfil various syntactic functions. I justify this somewhat paradoxical stance by exploring the essential similarities between quotations and non-linguistic demonstrations.