Abstract
This paper draws on Alessandro Capone’s recent monograph (The Pragmatics of indirect reports. Socio-philosophical considerations. Springer Verlag, Cham, 2016) with a view to promoting debate on the importance of reporting and, in particular, of indirect reporting as a paradigmatic case of a language game revealing the entire subjectivity of a speaker, their illocutionary and perlocutionary intent. The framework for the study of indirect reporting is furnished by pragmatics – or, rather, by sociopragmatics – in that it is concerned with what happens within the social fact (as Saussure called it), where the practices of signifying come to life, including the practice of referring to what others have said.
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- 1.
A notion introduced by Émile Durkheim in his doctoral thesis (Durkheim 1984) and embraced by Saussure.
- 2.
As Jef Verschueren points out, «pragmatics does not constitute an additional component of a theory of language, but it offers a different perspective» (Verschueren 1999, 2).
- 3.
A very brief reference is made to direct speech in Leech (1983, 139) with regard to the avoidance of a direct-speech utterance as an example of the strategy of polite obliquity.
- 4.
In particular, Mey (2001) 2 speaks of indirect speech and free indirect discourse, while in Bublitz and Norrick (2011) we find references to direct speech, indirect speech, reported speech, direct discourse, free indirect discourse and indirect discourse. Manuals of stylistics, on the other hand, speak widely of direct speech, indirect speech and free indirect discourse (cf., among others, Stockwell and Whiteley 2014).
- 5.
Nellie Wieland’s proposal is to treat indirect reports as a type of metarepresentation within a pragmatic framework: «the task of the reporter is to represent relevant features of the reported context to the audience and thereby convey something about the earlier context. The felicity of the report is constrained, in part, by the cognitive demands of interpreting the report given the current context and shared goals. It is plausible, to a certain extent, that the act of reporting involves having a theory of mind in order to understand what was said and meant in the original context, what the audience knows about the earlier context, and a representation of the two contexts and the respective agents’ epistemic attitudes toward those contexts» (Wieland 2013, 407). Capone «is still ready to grant that the issue can be studied from the angle of ‘metarepresentations’ (see the important paper by Wilson 2000)» but, unlike Wilson, proposes a much broader analysis perspective.
- 6.
Cf. Elisabeth Holt who proposes the image of a continuum along which both DS and IS are located: «it may be productive to view these devices as positioned on a continuum that stretches from DRS (= direct reported speech) on one side to glosses and summaries on the other» (Holt 2016, 185).
- 7.
Capone’s reference in this connection is to Jurgen Habermas (2001). Cf. also what Lev S. Vygotskij suggests in the second quotation in the epigraph about the relationship between language and action. He draws inspiration from Goethe who, through Faust’s words, states that «In the beginning was the deed» (Vygotsky 1986, 255), to underline that in the beginning there was a context of previous actions (and interactions), activities and experiences that were propaedeutic, so to speak, to the appearance of the word.
- 8.
- 9.
Deirdre Wilson speaks of exploitation of resemblances (Wilson 2000, 142) in order to explain the cognitive processes that come into play when an indirect account is interpreted and in IS these similarities are said to be interpretative, linked to the speaker’s subjective point of view (cf. Wilson 2000, 143).
- 10.
In this connection, Kecskes claims that, as communication is becoming increasingly intercultural, there is a need for «the development of a theory of meaning that can explain not only unilingual processing but also bi- and multilingual meaning construction and comprehension» (Kecskes 2008, 389).
- 11.
Capone is most attentive to the intercultural dimension of reporting and dedicates two chapters (7 and 8) to this feature in his book (Capone, 2016).
- 12.
Remember that the term pragmemes refers to «units of language use incorporating reference to the context in which they occur and to the culture in which they are embedded» (Capone 2016, 2).
- 13.
- 14.
In this sense the term sociopragmatics differs from the meaning given by Marcelo Dascal, who claims we have, as separate branches of pragmatics, psychopragmatics which deals with the «use of language in mental processes [italics in text]» and sociopragmatics «whose concern is the communicative use of language» (Dascal 2003, 27).
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Basile, G. (2019). What Can Linguistics Learn From Indirect Reports?. In: Capone, A., Carapezza, M., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00973-1_17
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