Speech act theory of quotation: Quotation indirect quotation and Japanese quasi-quotation

Etsuko Oishi

doi:10.1515/ip-2025-0007

Article

Speech act theory of quotation: Quotation indirect quotation and Japanese quasi-quotation

Etsuko Oishi
Etsuko Oishi is a professor of linguistics at Tokyo University of Science. She has been working on Austinian speech act theory, and published papers on expositives, indexicality, evidentiality and modality, and discourse markers. She contributed her paper of apologies to Handbooks of Pragmatics, The Pragmatics of Speech Actions (edited by Marina Sbisà and Ken Turner). She is the co-editor (with Anita Fetzer) of Context and Contexts: Parts Meet Whole? (John Benjamins 2011).

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From the journal Intercultural Pragmatics Volume 22 Issue 1

Abstract

The present paper addresses quotation using an Austinian effect-based speech act theory, and proposes to analyze different types of quotation in terms of distinct illocutionary effects each type brings about in a present speech situation. The major distinction is between illocutionary acts pertaining to locutions (phemes and rhemes) and those pertaining to someone’s illocutionary act. The former includes pure, scare and emphatic quotation and the latter direct, indirect, mixed, open and fictive quotation. The analysis of direct, indirect and fictive quotation reveals different ways someone’s illocutionary act is brought to the present speech situation: (i) the original speaker’s illocutionary act is revived in the present speech situation by the hearer who understands the force of the original locution as the illocutionary act that the original speaker performed (direct quotation); (ii) the original speaker’s illocutionary act is reported by the entextualized locution (indirect quotation); a fictive speaker’s illocutionary act is brought to the present speech situation as an illustration of a possible illocutionary act performed in a specific type of speech situation (fictive quotation). Quasi-quotation is analyzed as a mock type of quoting: the original speaker’s illocutionary act is revived in the present speech situation by the original locution together with the present speaker’s characterization of it by means of a special expression such as blah, blah, blah (type 1); the present speaker’s illocutionary act is performed as if it is the illocutionary act performed by an anonymous speaker to an anonymous hearer in an anonymous speech situation. In the proposed effect-based speech act theory utterances are systematically and coherently analyzed in terms of their effects as illocutionary acts brought about in the present speech situation. The mechanism of how those effects are brought about is explained by a speech-act-theoretic model of communication, in which a particular speaker, a particular hearer and a particular speech situation are distinguished, respectively, from the performer of an illocutionary-act type (the addresser), the recipient to whom the illocutionary-act type is performed (the addressee) and the context of illocutionary-act type.

Keywords: quotation; Japanese; quasi quotation; speech act theory; J.L. Austin; illocutionary effects

Corresponding author: Etsuko Oishi, Institute of Arts and Sciences, Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan, E-mail: oishi@rs.tus.ac.jp

About the author

Etsuko Oishi

Etsuko Oishi is a professor of linguistics at Tokyo University of Science. She has been working on Austinian speech act theory, and published papers on expositives, indexicality, evidentiality and modality, and discourse markers. She contributed her paper of apologies to Handbooks of Pragmatics, The Pragmatics of Speech Actions (edited by Marina Sbisà and Ken Turner). She is the co-editor (with Anita Fetzer) of Context and Contexts: Parts Meet Whole? (John Benjamins 2011).

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Published Online: 2025-04-09

Published in Print: 2025-03-26

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Keywords for this article

quotation; Japanese; quasi quotation; speech act theory; J.L. Austin; illocutionary effects