0 the symbols “ ” or ‘ ’ that are put around a word or phrase to show that someone else has written or said it --
One set of values is not merely exchanged for another, however, but placed in the background, so that its substitution appears, so to speak, in inverted commas.
The very words have scarcely yet entered the historian's vocabulary, except perhaps to the accompaniment of deprecatory inverted commas.
This is nowhere so well illustrated as in the thousands of inverted commas which litter academic papers (my own included).
Interestingly, in the latter case, the word is often placed within 'inverted commas'.
The placing of the closing inverted commas after the sentence-final stop is a common publishers' convention, if an illogical one.
Linguistically speaking, placing a word in inverted commas has the opposite effect; it becomes more inclusive.
Now, when we put a word in inverted commas are we in effect placing it within a proscenium, theatricalizing it?
The inverted commas around belongs suggest perhaps that standard notions of constituency do not apply here.
