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Indirect Reports and Pragmatics

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Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 1))

Abstract

An indirect report typically takes the form of a speaker using the locution “said that” to report an earlier utterance. In what follows, I introduce the principal philosophical and pragmatic points of interest in the study of indirect reports, including the extent to which context sensitivity affects the content of an indirect report, the constraints on the substitution of co-referential terms in reports, the extent of felicitous paraphrase and translation, the way in which indirect reports are opaque, and the use of indirect reports as pragmatic vehicles for other speech acts such as humor, insult, or irony. Throughout I develop several positions: (1) that a semantic analysis of indirect reports is insufficient, (2) that the distinction between direct and indirect reports is not clear and that indirect reports are the predominate way of reporting while direct reports may be a para-linguistic variation on them, (3) that most questions about the semantics and pragmatics of indirect reports will rely on a full understanding of the nature of what is reported and how it gets reported, (4) that an analysis of reporting requires the pragmatic tools of metarepresentation and a social, inter-personal understanding of relevance and shared knowledge.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cappelen and Lepore (1997b), p. 289. Note that Cappelen and Lepore’s aim is totally different from the aim of this paper. They say that it is because reporters are doing these things that we should not expect a semantic analysis to capture reports. Their goal is to protect semantics from what look like threatening examples from indirect reports. They acknowledge the semanticist’s inability to explain indirect reports, but maintain that this is because reporting is something that speakers do for non-semantic reasons. They do not offer or entertain a full-fledged pragmatic theory to explain the relevant linguistic features of indirect reports.

  2. 2.

    It is not widely agreed upon that quoting is equivalent to mentioning. It is clear that there are forms of mentioning that do not involve quoting. This leaves open the possibility that quoting is a subspecies of mentioning. Some quotation theorists [see Saka (1998) and Washington (1992)] argue that the analyses of quotation and mentioning will be closely related, if not the same. Others [see Cappelen and Lepore (2009)] disagree that quotation and mentioning correspond in this way.

  3. 3.

    In the quotation literature it is not universally accepted that quotation marks (and their corollaries) are semantic devices. I am glossing over these disagreements here.

  4. 4.

    Indirect reports have thus been described as containing “two voices” and as being micro-narrations. In reporting, the speaker is using her own voice in order to convey the voice of another (or from another context); in doing so she is establishing a kind of narrative with the locution “said that” that presupposes both common knowledge between the reporter and audience of the reporter’s goal, and common knowledge of relevant features of the context of the original utterance. See Capone (2010).

  5. 5.

    See Cappelen and Lepore (2004).

  6. 6.

    See Wieland (2010a) for an opposing view.

  7. 7.

    See Cappelen and Lepore (1997b), p. 282. They refer to these and some of the following examples as those with “partial semantic overlap” and suggest that such examples will require a pragmatic analysis.

  8. 8.

    This example is from Cappelen and Lepore (1997b), p. 285.

  9. 9.

    Cf. Capone (2010).

  10. 10.

    There is a substantial literature on belief ascription given co-referential substitution. For a good discussion please see Saul (1998).

  11. 11.

    As suggested by Cappelen and Lepore (2009).

  12. 12.

    For an elaborate account of the semantic and pragmatic details of metarepresentation and indirect discourse, see Recanati (2000). For an incisive criticism of this attempt, see Ludwig (2003).

  13. 13.

    Originally in Larson and Segal (1995). Quoted in Cappelen and Lepore (1997b), p. 284.

  14. 14.

    See Capone (2010).

  15. 15.

    Anderson and Lepore (2013), ‘Slurring words’.

  16. 16.

    See Tarski (1933) and Quine (1940, 1961).

  17. 17.

    See Geach (1957).

  18. 18.

    For the classic defense of the demonstrative theory (also called the paratactic theory), see Davidson (1979) and Seymour (1994). Accounts of the disquotational theory can be found in Richard (1986) and Ludwig and Ray (1998). Accounts of the use/identity theory can be found in Washington (1992), Saka (1998), Reimer (1996), and Recanati (2000, 2001). An overview and analysis of all of these views can be found in Cappelen and Lepore (2009).

  19. 19.

    See Cappelen and Lepore (2004) and Borg (2004).

  20. 20.

    Cappelen and Lepore (2006), pp. 1020–1021.

  21. 21.

    With modification from Cappelen and Lepore (2004), p. 127.

  22. 22.

    See Wieland (2010b) for an opposing view.

  23. 23.

    Note that he is arguing against Cappelen and Lepore (1997a), who reject this analysis.

  24. 24.

    Here we can see how underdeveloped this analysis is. The interjection of ‘literally’ clearly sounds like it is marking off a direct quote. On the other hand, is it functioning as a demonstration? This is less clear.

  25. 25.

    Wilson (2000), p. 415.

  26. 26.

    Schiffer (1987), pp. 246–7.

  27. 27.

    See Wilson (2000) and references therein.

  28. 28.

    Wilson (2000), p. 420.

  29. 29.

    These are described in Wilson (2000), pp. 421–422. She borrows these three categories from Sperber (1994).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA

    Nellie Wieland

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  1. Nellie Wieland
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Correspondence to Nellie Wieland .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Barcellona PG ME, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

  2. University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Franco Lo Piparo

  3. University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Marco Carapezza

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Wieland, N. (2013). Indirect Reports and Pragmatics. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_17

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