Open AccessOn the syntax of direct quotation in French
Author(s) -
Olivier Bonami,
Danièle Godard
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2008.21
Subject(s) - linguistics , utterance , verb , variety (cybernetics) , complement (music) , sign (mathematics) , denotation (semiotics) , syntax , sentence , computer science , relation (database) , mathematics , artificial intelligence , philosophy , mathematical analysis , biochemistry , chemistry , database , complementation , semiotics , gene , phenotype
Direct quotation raises three major problems for grammatical modelling: (i) the variety of quotedmaterial (which can be a non linguistic behavior, or a sign in a different language), (ii) theembedding of an utterance inside another one, (iii) a special denotation, the content of thequotation being the utterance itself. We propose a unary rule, which turns the quoted material intoa linguistic sign whose content is itself a behavior, which entertains a resemblance relation to thebehavior demonstrated by the speaker. Syntactically, direct quotation comes in two varieties: it canbe the complement of a quotative verb, or constitutes a head sentence, modified by an adjunctcontaining a quotative verb whose complement is extracted and identified with its local features.