UCLA

While quotation has been a popular area of study among semanticists, there has been a dearth of work related to how people say quotations in spoken speech, in the absence of orthographic quotation marks. Using corpus methodology, I identify three key intonational features of subclausal quotation in spoken American English: the Emphatic Juncture, pitch range reset, and a quotation-final IP break. I then validate these three intonational features and determine which is most responsible for identifying the presence of subclausal quotation using a comprehension experiment. I then discuss how these three intonational features relate to semantic analyses of subclausal quotation (Cappelen and Lepore, 1997; Potts, 2007). Subclausal quotation intonation also poses challenges to the current understanding of intonational theory, particularly regarding the Strict Layer Hypothesis (Selkirk, 1986), through the discovery of evidence for embedded IPs in American English.