Quotation in Context

It appears that in mixed quotations like the following, the quoted expression is used and mentioned at the same time: George says Tony is his ‘bestest friend’. Most theories seek to account for this observation by assuming that mixed quotations operate at two levels of content at once. In contradistinction to such two-dimensional theories, we propose that quotation involves just a single level of content. Quotation always produces a change in meaning of the quoted expression, and if the quotation is mixed the shift is, to a first approximation at least, from α to ‘what x calls ‘α’’, where x is a variable whose value is determined by the context. We argue that quotation is generally context dependent in various ways, and that some of these ways are presuppositional in nature; we present a detailed analysis of the presuppositions in question.