The pragmatics of air quotes in English academic presentations

The present contribution investigates the use of air quotes in English academic presentations held by and addressed to scholars of various disciplines. The first part of the paper provides a detailed formal description of the air quotes identified based on gesture realization and gesture-speech coordination. The analysis confirms the existence of a conventional gesture format to which alternative realizations approximate, and of strong regularities in terms of type of air quotes’ recognizable referent and gesture placement with respect to such referent. The second part of the paper presents a functional analysis, in which it is argued that air quotes have two key pragmatic functions: a) they “manage the match” between linguistic representations and propositional content by signaling the relative vagueness/preciseness of the terms used, and b) they “manage attributions” by indexing the speaker´s commitment to the truth of the proposition, and hence maintain her/his epistemic authority and credibility as a scholar. The study provides insight into how air quotes relate metapragmatically to a specific discourse genre situated in an international multidisciplinary academic discourse community.