The simple answer is no. All words are not self-denoting. You seem to confusing denoting with use-mention distinction. Let's walk through it.
In linguistics and philosophy, the denotation of an expression is its literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of being warm.strong text
Thus, if a word doesn't have the properties itself that it denotes, it is not self-denoting. Words that are self-denoting are autological.
For example, 'hot' has a denotation that something is not cold, is capable of burning flesh, has a certain temperature, and so on. Is the word 'hot' itself hot? As a general rule no. You could create the word 'hot' in iron, put in the fire, and then when it's glowing pull it out and say, 'hot' is now hot! There'd be an argument whether the word 'hot' consists of the medium in which it is created or not, and so on, but the important thing to remember, is that denotation is satisifed by meeting the criteria of the definition. Hence, 'no' is a word that is not very sesquipedalian (MW), but 'sesquipedalian' is sequipedalian! Thus, 'sesquipedalian' is self-denoting, but hot is not.
The apostrophes you mention are not a syntactical mechanism to express self-denotation, but rather are to differentiate between use and mention. For instance, 'the snow is white' is true if the snow is white, is a famous philosophical claim regarding the relationship between words and objects and is part of a theory of metalanguage. There is a difference between 'John' and John means that there is a difference between the name John and the person John. Linguists will often use subscripts to express the same idea; so again, there is a difference between JOHN1 and JOHN2 where JOHN1 is the name John and JOHN2 is the person John. (Note, that one can use appositives, which is the traditional mechanism in English grammar.)
So it's important to understand that denotation and use-mention distinction are distinct concepts, and not to confuse the two, even though when writing about self-denotation, use-mention distinction is used.
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