‘‘Yes, today,’’ she said. ‘‘I lunched with him. We walked in the Park.’’ She
stopped. They had walked in the Park. A thrush had been singing; they
had stopped to listen. ‘‘That’s the wise thrush that sings each song twice
over. .. ’’ he had said. ‘‘Does he?’’ she had asked innocently.And it had
been a quotation.The mistake was in not recognizing it as a quotation and thinking it was an
assertion that could be questioned. Quotations have lost their assertoric
force; it is inappropriate to treat them as if they were being asserted by the
speaker. The speaker merely mentions the expression; he or she does not
assert it as true.
Consider another example from Franz Kafka’s (1979)A Little Fable.
1‘‘Oh!’’ said the mouse. ‘‘The world is getting smaller every day.’’ ‘‘Oh!’’ is
an expression of illocutionary force or attitude, that of resignation
I suppose, whereas ‘‘The world is getting smaller every day’’ is an expres-
sion of the content of a belief. In direct quotation, one could perhaps say,
‘‘The mouse said ‘Oh, the world is getting smaller every day,’’’ but more
likely the marker of attitude would be deleted. In the case of indirect
quotation the illocutionary marker is obligatorily deleted: ‘‘The mouse
said that the world is getting smaller every day,’’ thereby losing the marker
of illocutionary force; the quoted expression has become what I have
called pure thought. Or one could compensate for the loss by moving the
illocutionary force outside the quoted clause and indicating it by elabor-
ating the speech act verb: ‘‘The mousebemoanedthat the world is getting
smaller every day.’’ But notice that here it is the reporter who has assigned
the illocutionary force that may or may not coincide with that held by the
original speaker. The important point is that the quoted clause has lost its
illocutionary force to become a simple thought, no longer anyone’s belief.
There are two results of quoting utterances, the increasingly sharp
distinction between a belief and a thought, and the heightened awareness
of personal, private perspectives or subjectivity. Let us consider them
in turn.
THE EMANCIPATION OF PURE THOUGHT
The first result is the new kind of meaning of the quoted expression once
divorced from the illocutionary force of the speaker. The meaning is no
longer the speaker’s meaning but a kind of abstract sentence meaning or
literal meaning that I have described as pure thought. They have become
ideas for contemplation rather than assertions to be believed or denied.
Such language is what makes contemplative thought possible. What
I mean by contemplative thought as opposed to ordinary thought is that
- Monica Smith first pointed out the difficulty of quoting such interjections. And thanks
to Keith Barton for providing me with the reference.
396 Epilogue