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Language and Mind Seminar – “Quotative ‘Be Like’”
Title: Quotative 鈥楤e Like鈥�
(joint work with Andreas Stokke (Uppsala))
Abstract:聽 There are a variety of familiar ways of talking about our mental states and speech acts, such as direct discourse (as in, ‘Ellen said, 鈥淚’m leaving now!鈥濃��), indirect discourse (as in, 鈥楨llen thought that she would leave鈥�). DD and ID continue to raise difficult philosophical and linguistic issues; but if they are still not fully understood, that is not for lack of trying: there are thousands of philosophical papers about belief and belief ascription, and hundreds or thousands about other attitudes: desire, knowledge, thinking, and so on.聽 By contrast, one common way we characterise our own mental states and speech acts has entirely escaped philosophical attention: quotative ‘be like鈥� or QBL (as in, ‘Ellen was like 鈥淚’m leaving now!鈥濃��). We argue that neglect of QBL has resulted in a significant gap in our understanding of our own minds and our ways of talking about them.聽 QBL is interesting because it is very common 鈥� corpus studies reveal that it is more common than 鈥榮ays鈥� or 鈥榯hinks鈥� in many dialects of English, and related constructions are common in other languages as well 鈥� and because (as we show) QBL functions very differently to DD and ID, and in particular is not reducible to 鈥檚ays鈥� or 鈥檛hinks鈥� ascriptions.聽 Showing that QBL is distinctive in this respect is the first aim of this paper; a second aim is to map out some of the space of theoretical options for explaining QBL.