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The acoustic profile of English metalinguistic quotation

par Schlechtweg, Marcel;De Brabanter, Philippe ;Haertl, Holden
Editeur scientifique Schlechtweg, Marcel
Référence Interfaces of Phonetics, Mouton De Gruyter
Publication A Paraître, 2024-03

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Résumé :

Quotes, or quotation marks, are commonly used to point to the linguistic character of an expression. For example, in the sentence Most students recognize that “peace” is a noun, the quotes help direct the reader’s attention to the word peace, not its denotation. This is an example of pure quotation, which differs from sentences like Most students recognize that peace is a must, in which peace is used denotationally and describes the opposite of war. Although we have by now a good theoretical understanding of quotation, more empirical evidence is desirable to characterize the phenomenon adequately. The present contribution connects to a recent study (Schlechtweg and Härtl 2020) that investigated whether and how quotation and quotes are articulated and showed systematic acoustic differences between expressions with and without quotes. While this previous study looked at name-informing quotation in German (e.g., Viele Mönche tragen die sogenannte „Kutte“ täglich von morgens bis abends. ‘Many monks wear the so-called “robe” every day from morning to night.’), the current chapter places the emphasis on pure quotation in English and aims at widening our understanding of the way language users deal with quotation in speech. Our results confirm the findings from the previous study, which showed that quotes are pronounced, and further support the idea that quotation is in essence a pragmatic, not semantic, operation. On the basis of the results from the previous and the current study, we further treat quotation as a phonetic, not phonological, phenomenon.