What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

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awer
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What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by awer »

As when you quote someone and you actually say you're quoting them. It seems like it coordinates part of a sentence as do prepositions and conjuctions, except it hasn't grammaticalized yet.

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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by zompist »

When syntax doesn't know what to do with something, it gets thrown in the adverb bin. Something similar— essentially a spoken punctuation mark— is "sic"...which the AHD calls an adverb.

Unless someone's covered it already, this is your chance to do some syntax. :) It'd be interesting, for instance, to know where exactly it can fit in a sentence, or more interestingly, where it can't go.

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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by Sumelic »

Another mystery: why do so many people use the two words together as a prefix to whatever they're quoting, rather than putting them around the quoted material as with written quotation marks.

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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by Viktor77 »

It's called a quotative. There's been quite a bit of study on it lately, especially quotatives like, 'BE + like', 'said', 'GO', etc.

For example:

Some of the best food I have ever had was out of a -outside or inside
of a place that we drove up and I was like I'm not eating in there.

Some girl goes do you dares want to go picnic?

She said, Alright, I'll go....

These are from a corpus of an associate of mine from interviews. I don't know the exact study he used them in off the top of my head.
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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by jal »

There are quite a number of languages, iirc, that have these "direct speech introducing" particles. The reason for grouping "quote" with "unquote" would be that it's for introducing the speech, and it's typically quite clear when it ends. Air quotes are also typically used to introduce rather than circumvent what is quoted.


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clawgrip
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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by clawgrip »

It's not just a quotative, because "quote ... unquote" is not limited to marking the content of what someone says; it can also be used as spoken scare quotes, meaning it can go before any content word. before a noun it is like an adjective, similar to "so-called", but before some other word, I guess we're stuck with adverb.

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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by linguoboy »

clawgrip wrote:It's not just a quotative, because "quote ... unquote" is not limited to marking the content of what someone says; it can also be used as spoken scare quotes, meaning it can go before any content word. before a noun it is like an adjective, similar to "so-called", but before some other word, I guess we're stuck with adverb.
What is the actual definition of "quotative", though? Since anything can be quoted, isn't this definitionally something which can precede any content word? Whereas I can't think of another adverb I can substitute in: ""He's a quote-unquote linguist"." But, as you say, "so-called" works here and that's pretty indisputably adjectival.

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clawgrip
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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by clawgrip »

Based on Viktor's post, I assumed "quotative" meant a complementizer that marks the actual content of a verb of speech/writing/thought/etc.

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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by Gulliver »

The OED lists it as an imperative verb, which I am not sure I wholly agree with. The entry is rather short.

I suppose it's interpreted as a sort of imperative-to-self. COMMENCE QUOTING! DESIST QUOTING! sorta thing.

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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by clawgrip »

Imperative? That's bizarre. I can't figure out any possible way to use it as an imperative.

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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by Kereb »

Gulliver wrote:The OED lists it as an imperative verb, which I am not sure I wholly agree with. The entry is rather short.

I suppose it's interpreted as a sort of imperative-to-self. COMMENCE QUOTING! DESIST QUOTING! sorta thing.
yeah that really doesn't cover what it's doing when it appears that way
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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by sirdanilot »

Quotative particles (if you don't know what something is, call it a 'particle', that's always a great waste bin for pesky little grammatical words) are very common cross-linguistically, and in fact more common than 'indirect quotes' (she says that...). Think of the Biblical Hebrew 'lemor' or wayyomer. The old Dutch Bible Translation uses 'zeggende' (saying) in every place where the Hebrew has 'lemor', but it just looks absolutely ridiculous.

Colloquial Dutch also introduces some 'quotative' particle:

van ('from'): En ik zei zo tegen tante Bep van 'wat een lekkere taart !' (And I said to aunt Bep 'quot' 'what a nice cake !'

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Zaarin
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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by Zaarin »

Doesn't "quote...unquote" come from dictating telegraphs? "He said QUOTE I have a message STOP UNQUOTE STOP" sort of thing?
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Re: What part of speech is "quote ... unquote"?

Post by linguoboy »

Zaarin wrote:Doesn't "quote...unquote" come from dictating telegraphs? "He said QUOTE I have a message STOP UNQUOTE STOP" sort of thing?
Possibly, but how is that relevant?

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