Explanation
Quotation is the marked incorporation of another or earlier utterance into a new context. It preserves wording or an identified excerpt while changing its function because selection, framing, and textual neighbourhood are new. Quotation marks alone guarantee neither accuracy nor fairness: a correctly reproduced sentence may mislead through omission or recontextualisation. Quotations distribute voice and authority, enable verification and continuation, yet may also appropriate another's speech. Scholarly quotation therefore includes source, version, extent, translation, and intervention history. The concept reveals how language simultaneously repeats and relocates an earlier utterance, requiring identity of wording and difference of use to be examined together.
Movement of thought
1. An utterance first exists in an earlier situation with a particular speaker, medium, purpose, and context. 2. A new voice selects an excerpt, marks its provenance, and places it within another text or discourse. 3. Introduction, abridgement, commentary, and new neighbours give the retained wording another communicative function. 4. A counter-test compares source, exact version, omissions, and context and asks whether framing distorts the earlier sense. 5. The other voice returns recognisably in the new text while remaining traceable to its original location.
Scientific use case
Citation, discourse, and science studies can examine selection, function, contextual fidelity, and citation networks. Editorial scholarship compares versions and documents normalisation, translation, and ellipsis.
Example
A report retains the sentence “The mapping remains provisional”, gives page and version, and explains that the later study confirms rather than removes this qualification.
Counterexample
An author restates a source in her own words and correctly marks it as paraphrase. Although the idea is borrowed, no direct quotation occurs without a claim to reproduce wording.
Distinction
Distinguish quotation from paraphrase, allusion, plagiarism, indirect speech, and intertextuality in general. Quotation claims marked reproduction; accuracy and contextual fairness are separate criteria.
Effect on thought and perception
Quotation creates polyphony, verifiability, and historical connection, while selective framing may borrow authority, reduce opponents, or detach voices from context.
Resonance
An earlier voice enters a new space; its wording sounds again, but the new surroundings alter what is foregrounded and answered within it.
Etymology
Technical core term; individual etymological review pending
Provenance
Unresolved relation network → core-concept review → Metzler/HWRh cross-check → ATLAS 238
Cite this entry
Reich, Michael (Hrsg./ed.): „Quotation“. Atlas der Sprache, AT-CORE-238-028. ATLAS 260, data model 1.6.0. https://atlasoflanguage.com/concept/AT-CORE-238-028The address remains stable; editorial content may evolve. Editorial reading state: 2026-10-15. Include your access date for precise references.
Historical background
Locke values historical records while warning that quotation can introduce misunderstanding, selection and error. A writer’s use of another writer is not a new observation of the event or argument being reported. In his account, repeated quotation cannot strengthen an original claim merely by making it older and more familiar. This historical discussion does not make quotation inherently suspect; it makes the relation to the quoted source examinable. For the Atlas, the important movement is from treating a visible citation as a guarantee to asking what was actually consulted and how faithfully it is represented. A direct quotation, a paraphrase and a quotation taken from a third party provide different evidence of contact with the original. Locke’s position is one contribution to the history of source criticism, not a complete genealogy of the English noun quotation or of typographic quotation practices. Those lexical and material histories must be established separately.
How conceptual history changes the analysis
A quotation first establishes an act of reuse. Its accuracy and evidential force each require their own check.
References for the historical section
- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (first published with the date 1690), Books III–IV; Gutenberg transcription identified as based on the second edition · IV.xvi.11, historical records and the reliability of citations when originals are unavailable
Selected original-English passages read; not collated against first-edition page images. Modern profile labels are explicitly distinguished from the terminology used by Locke. His account of ideas is a historical philosophical position, not a verified contemporary model of language or cognition.