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Abstract
In his influential paper, François Récanati (2001) distinguishes two kinds of quotation, namely ‘closed’ and ‘open’, and develops a pragmatic view on open quotation. Facing some alleged arguments against his pragmatic view, he argues for a distinction between the compositionally articulated content of an utterance i(c-content) and its intuitive truth-conditional content. He also makes the strong claim that one can only hold a pragmatic account of quotation if one is adopting his analysis of the pragmatics/semantics-interface. In this paper I will show that this claim is far too strong by developing a pragmatic account of open quotation without adopting Récanati’s proposal, i.e. a ‘traditional’ view on the interface between semantics and pragmatics. It will be argued that sentences containing open quotations semantically express the same proposition as their quotation free counterparts. The effect that the quotations contribute to a sentence’s meaning is in triggering an implicature. It will be argued that this account not only explains all types of open quotations in a unique way but also has some conceptual advantages over Récanati’s one.