They provide some further visual disambiguation. But still, even if they are mere “style”, style matters. For long ages now those quotation marks – and many oth

They provide some further visual disambiguation. But still, even if they are mere “style”, style matters. For long ages now those quotation marks – and many other features (take a look at e.g. Oxford University Press’s in-house style guide) – have been a feature of professional English-language typesetting. The public has grown used to them, and typesetting that fails to employ such things tends to look cheap and amateur (and therefore untrustworthy and not worth buying or citing) to a readership that publishers are trying to target.