Quotation marks - A pragmatic indicator

Abstract

Quotation marks in Vietnamese have so far only been mentioned from the perspective of writing practice; there has not been any in-depth research to understand their value in expressing meaning, especially from the pragmatic aspect. The goal of this article is to present an alternative approach to quotation marks, provide discussions on their pragmatic characteristics and consider that issue in the Vietnamese corpus. Specifically, we will present a classification table of quotation marks and explore the mechanism of deriving the implicatures in each type of quotation marks. The conclusion we aim for is that quotation marks are indeed a pragmatic indicator that helps the writer implement communicative strategies and indicates to the reader the attached pragmatic value that needs to be inferred to properly understand the meaning of the utterances contain them.