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A quotation or quote is the repetition of a sentence, phrase, or passage from speech or text that someone has said or written. [1] In oral speech, it is the representation of an utterance (i.e. of something that a speaker actually said) that is introduced by a quotative marker, such as a verb of saying.
In English writing, quotation marks or inverted commas, also known informally as quotes, talking marks, [1] [2] speech marks, [3] quote marks, quotemarks or speechmarks, are punctuation marks placed on either side of a word or phrase in order to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name.
The long quotation from Dante's Inferno that prefaces T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is part of a speech by one of the damned in Dante's Hell. The epigraph to E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime quotes Scott Joplin's instructions to those who play his music, "Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast."
Quotation marks [A] are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same glyph. [3] Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media.
Air quotes, also called finger quotes, are virtual quotation marks formed in the air with one's fingers when speaking. The gesture is typically done with both hands held shoulder-width apart and at the eye or shoulders level of the speaker, with the index and middle fingers on each hand flexing at the beginning and end of the phrase being ...
Writers use scare quotes for a variety of reasons. They can imply doubt or ambiguity in words or ideas within the marks, [18] or even outright contempt. [19] They can indicate that a writer is purposely misusing a word or phrase [20] or that the writer is unpersuaded by the text in quotes, [21] and they can help the writer deny responsibility for the quote. [19]
A complement of a verbum dicendi can be direct or indirect speech. Direct speech is a single unit of linguistic object that is '"mentioned" rather than used.' [1] In contrast, indirect speech is a proposition whose parts make semantic and syntactic contribution to the whole sentence just like parts of the matrix clause (i.e. the main clause/sentence, as opposed to an embedded clause).
However, several writing guidebooks discourage its use with regard to dialect, such as in cases of American and British English spelling differences. [ 8 ] [ 11 ] [ 13 ] The appearance of a bracketed sic after the word analyse in a book review led Bryan A. Garner to comment, "all the quoter (or overzealous editor) [sic] demonstrated was ...