Indirect Reports and Pragmatics

This volume offers the reader a singular overview of current thinking on indirect reports. The contributors are eminent researchers from the fields of philosophy of language, theoretical linguistics and communication theory, who answer questions on this important issue. This exciting area of controversy has until now mostly been treated from the viewpoint of philosophy. This volume adds the views from semantics, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics.

Authors address matters such as the issue of semantic minimalism vs. radical contextualism, the attribution of responsibility for the modes of presentation associated with Noun Phrases and how to distinguish the indirect reporter's responsibility from the original speaker's responsibility. They also explore the connection between indirect reporting and direct quoting. Clearly indirect reporting has some bearing on the semantics/pragmatics debate, however, there is much controversy on what is said, whether this is aminimal semantic logical form (enriched by saturating pronominals) or a much richer and fully contextualized logical form. This issue will be discussed from several angles. Many of the authors are contextualists and the discussion brings out the need to take context into account when one deals with indirect reports, both the context of the original utterance and the context of the report. It is interesting to see how rich cues and clues can radically transform the reported message, assigning illocutionary force and how they can be mobilized to distinguish several voices in the utterance. Decoupling the voice of the reporting speaker from that of the reported speaker on the basis of rich contextual clues is an important issue that pragmatic theory has to tackle. Articles on the issue of slurs will bring new light to the issue of decoupling responsibility in indirect reporting, while others are theoretically oriented and deal with deep problems in philosophy and epistemology.

The only current volume that highlights indirect reports as an important issue in the philosophy of language Offers contributions by eminent philosophers and linguists in an interdisciplinary setting Various perspectives on indirect reports and their bearing on the semantics/pragmatics debate

Contenu

Introduction.- Part I The (social) praxis of indirect reports.- 1. Indirect reporting in bilingual language production.- 2. Reported speech; a clinical pragmatics perspective.- 3. On the (complicated) relationship between direct and indirect reports.- 4. Indirect reports in Hungarian.- 5. Indirect reports, quotation, and narrative.- 6. Reporting dialogue and the role of grammar.- 7. Indirect reports and workplace norms.- 8. Indirect reported speech in interaction.- 9. The semantics of citation.- 10. The reporting of slurs.- 11. Indirectly reporting and translating slurring utterances.- 12. When Reporting Others Backfires.- 13. The question of reported speech: identifying an occupational hazard.- Part II Indirect reports in philosophy of language.- 14. A theory of saying reports.- 15. Pretend reference and coreference.- 16. Indirect discourse and quotation.- 17. The Syntax-Pragmatics Merger: Belief Reports in the Theory of Default Semantic.- 18. Speaking for another.- 19. On the inferential structure of indirect reports.- 20. Integrated parentheticals in quotations and free indirect discourse.- 21. Faithfulness and 'de se'.- 22. She and herself.- 23. Impure 'de se' thoughts and pragmatics (and how this is relevant to pragmatics and Immunity to Error through Misidentification).- 24. Reporting Practices and Reported Entities.- 25. Indirect reports, information, and non-declaratives.- 26. Reports, indirect reports, and illocutionary point.- 27. Reporting and interpreting intentions in defamation law.- 28. The Pragmatics of Indirect Discourse in Artificial Languages.- 29. The proper name theory of quotation and indirect reported speech.