Abstract
This chapter is an attempt to reconcile sociopragmatics a là Mey (2001) with more philosophical approaches to indirect reports. The result is hybrid, but not one to be ashamed of. Indirect reporting is the testing bed for a socio-pragmatic theory and I will show that socio-pragmatics has something to say about constraints on reporting what one said. In this chapter, I capitalize on advances made in the theory of indirect reports in a very fruitful paper by Norrick (2016).
In many cases in which an agent asserts a proposition by assertively uttering s in a context c, one can report that assertion by assertively uttering A said/asserted that s in a related context c’. Let us suppose we have a case of this sort in which the agent asserted both the proposition p that is the semantic content of s with respect to c and some stronger proposition q as well. Let us suppose further that the semantic content of s in the original context c is the same as the semantic content of s in the reporting context c’. Then it would seem that the reporter’s usage of that s in c’ might be taken as designating p or as designating q. In other words, a person assertively uttering the attitude ascription might use the that-clause either to pick out the semantic content of s in the reporting context, or to pick out a different proposition q. Depending on which of these is selected, the reporter will be taken as claiming either that the agent asserted p or that the agent asserted q. (Soames 2002, 134).
In this chapter, I am mainly interested in seeing how the humor and wit by Luciana Littizzetto (or actor Benigni) could be applicable in a class situation. Luciana Littizzetto acted in a film in which she represented a school teacher who had an extremely good relationship with her students, over whom she had control through her irony. I tried to see what difficulties imitating Luciana Littizzetto’s style in a real school would create.
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- 1.
This is not to say that by investigating the problem of the socio-pragmatics of indirect reports we cannot say or we should give up the aim to say something general about the nature of communication and about the idea that rationality can have a strong impact on and at least partially determine or shape communicative practices.
- 2.
When one says that the report should somehow reflect the original utterance, one is implicitly admitting that the report must be a function of the original utterance and that there should be something quite general to be called the ‘praxis of indirect reporting’ allowing us to compute two related but not necessarily identical functions allowing us to move from the original utterance to the report and from the report to the original utterance. Specularity consists in the fact that, regardless of the distortion and deviation we allow into the system, the social practice will determine that the function of indirect reporting is mainly to let knowledge flow from one mind to another through the intermediary of the indirect reporter while at the same time providing a sketch of what the original speaker’s mind had to be like at the time he proffered the utterance.
- 3.
This looks like a case in which a speaker loses control over what he says. In a sense it is true, as Cooren 2008 says that “communicating always consists of producing texts that function like machines, that is, that always operate without being totally controlled by their producers” (p. 25); however, speakers try to regain control over what they say by the mobilization of clues or by the mobilization of pragmatic principles.
- 4.
In order to explain what is going on here, it may be useful to use an example. Suppose that the original utterance is proffered in a context C. Context C contains elements X, X1, X2, X3, Xn, all relevant to the interpretation of utterance U. Somehow, we can represent X, X1, X2, X3, Xn as elements contained in a certain envelope. However, when the reporter passes the message U from S to H, he closes and seals the envelope containing the elements of the context determining (or enriching) the interpretation of U. The reporter passes another envelope containing U to the hearer, but he does not pass him or her the envelope containing the elements of the context. Thus, U cannot any longer be inspected by letting X, X1, X2, X3, Xn interact with U. All we have is U. If U is presented as if it only consists of a literal proposition, all the hearers have available is the literal proposition (and nothing else). They cannot have access to the envelope containing X, X1, X2, X3, Xn because the reporter has concealed that envelope. However, it is not to be excluded that in the future they might accuse the reporter of concealing important information which would have enriched and modified the (bare) proposition P communicated.
- 5.
We normally presuppose that we are responsible for the things we say not only in the sense that we are ready to provide justification for what we say, but also in the sense that we exclude that there are voices (belonging to someone else) being inserted into our minds. Although my readers may find this digression funny and peculiar, it is not unusual to find people who have been indoctrinated by their parents, by their teachers or by society in general. Although nobody really questions the fact that the things people say might come from themselves (and claim that they might come from someone else), it is not extraordinary that people should act and say things according to a script because they know this is what is normal to do, what society wants or expects us to do. This is why it is really of importance to train the individual not only to accept the things he accepts but to look for and find alternatives to the things he accepts, in order to be able to compare the things he accepts with the things he might accept (even though he does not accept them at the moment); only in this way, does the individual really show himself to speak for himself, rather than for generic others who somehow managed to get implanted into his mind.
- 6.
However, there is the possibility of implicit quotation, in which case part of the utterance could belong to author 1 (the speaker) and part of the utterance (the quoted utterance) could belong to Author 2 (the quoted author). (See Holt 2015 for the notion of implicit quotation).
- 7.
This can be considered echoic, following suggestions by Relevance Theorists. One cannot deny that Italian culture (especially films or ordinary parlance) has bombarded Italians with the idea that homosexuals are despicable. It is difficult to count the victims of this culture – one need not send people to a concentration camp to eliminate them. One can simply instigate them to commit suicide. God knows how many young people have been the victims of this (self-perpetuating) culture. In any case, the parlance of ordinary Italians is full of utterances expressing the idea that homosexuals would better die. This is what this hypothetical teacher is echoing. (On the one hand, the government officially condemns homophobia, on the other hand they do not do anything to prohibit slurs in films in which humor is achieved too cheaply).
- 8.
The purpose of irony may well be to condemn a certain view. Although the view is apparently voiced (though not asserted, to follow Davis 2016), the speaker makes clear that this cannot be his voice (he may even change the quality of his voice dramatically to point this out). Irony clearly puts the hearer to excessive processing efforts and it is this unnecessary dose of processing efforts to determine the condemnation of the view just voiced. By being ironic, the speaker is not expressing his views on the matter, but is forcing the hearers to form their own view and express their own condemnation of the view thus expressed. The ironic speaker somehow forces the hearers to adopt an active attitude, to be complicit in the condemnation of a certain view by co-authoring the act of condemnation. Recourse to implicit levels of meaning is, thus, to be seen as forcing the hearers to take responsibility in the production of the utterance that replaced the one actually proffered, in endorsing its condemnation of a certain view. Although the ironic speaker may predict that some of his hearers may refuse to participate in the act of condemnation (of a homophobic attitude), he proffers an utterance that is quite strong and involves consequences that are so serious that even a homophobic hearer may refuse to accept them. The speaker is confident that the irony is likely to lead them to reflect on how easy it is to adopt certain general attitudes of hatred and how easy it is to be responsible for repulsive actions. The speaker is implicitly arguing (there may be a tacit argument going on) that an act like sending homosexual to gas chambers is a consequence (and a natural one) of being homophobic. Since he anticipates that even the most homophobic hearers may not inclined to accept the extreme consequences (sending homosexuals to gas chambers), he hopes that they will dissociate from the homophobic attitudes which are taken to naturally lead to them. Thus, the ironic teacher hopes that the hearers will dissociate from the consequences of the homophobic attitudes in the hope that they will consequently dissociate themselves from the premises which lead to the extreme consequences.
- 9.
It is of interest to me that Cooren (2008, 28) points to the notion of incarnation in an example in which a person expresses frustration through sighs, specific intonation, facial expression, etc. Here, instead, (in the teacher’s discourse) the actant being incarnated is homophobia, which is dramatized and ventriloquized. The action of looking upward – that is to say avoiding eye-contact with the students – is a good way of incarnating Homophobia, which involves feeling superior and also involves treating some people as sub-humans. When we commit our worst actions we are not capable of looking into the eyes of the people we damage – thus looking upward is the best way of incarnating Homophobia. On the one hand, it can be considered as a marker of acting (fictional acting), on the other hand it can be considered as a marker of depersonalization – someone who makes something ignoble in a sense is acting (in a fictional way) because he is situating himself in a position which is de-humanized. He is acting in the sense that he is not being himself, but he is obeying voices which are not his own (like Nazi officials who obeyed orders in sending Jews to the gas chambers and thus abandoned their real ‘selves’ in fear of losing their ‘selves’).
- 10.
In other words, in assessing the propositions presented by the speaker, the hearers cannot confine themselves to the hic and nunc of the conversation, but must open up files they held in memory and compare the things said now with the things said previously (in the teacher’s past), to reconstruct the textual self. Reconstruction of this textual self may very well involve the elimination of contradictions, but this process of contradiction elimination is not usually done by deleting the things said in the past, although this could very well be done. In general, it is the past that is prioritized, as the speaker is able to construct a textual self that is coherent and extends in time (and is not confined to a single episode; thus, the single episode is probably not sufficient in itself to add to the picture so far constructed of the textual self). Why is it that the past, rather than the present, is prioritized? Is this something that flows from cognitive principles or is it flowing in any case from generalizations about communicative practice? One could very well admit that the present is more important than the past, in the sense that one has the right to change one’s mind. So why is it that the past textual self and not the present one is chosen? (Of course, a superficial explanation is that while the past textual self is held in memory through assertions that are somehow categorized as ‘serious’, the present textual self is still under interpretation and it is not impossible that if the interpretation is an ironic one, the hearer may simply suspend his judgment). Hearers may very well take the textual self as one which was projected throughout a number of years and thus has had the opportunity to become sedimented and consolidated.
- 11.
A quantity implicature may be involved here. Given that, according to Levinson, what is not said is not said, if one reports an utterance U literally, it can be inferred that the speaker only said what is literally reported and nothing else. Thus, it must be excluded that further enrichments were made or were to be made in context.
- 12.
Although I say that a speaker knows that she can be reported either literally or non-literally, what I really mean is that she should know that this might happen. And she should know not this because she is inclined to detect fraud or attempts at misrepresenting her speech, but because our reflections and considerations as brought out in this chapter should alert any speaker to the fact that she faces this problem (or danger), that there is the possibility of being intentionally misrepresented. It is true that a speaker may well follow a principle of positive thinking and be optimistic about the possibility of finding other members of the community who take an interest in protecting her, but being exposed to experience involves being confronted with cases of manipulation of the information and it is, therefore, likely that a potential speaker will develop strategies aimed at protecting her textual self. Protecting one’s textual self involves knowing that there may be conflicts of interest between the speaker and the hearers and that, if such conflicts prevail, there is no guarantee that the hearers (in practice) will be honest and will not manipulate the information transmitted in reporting her (although there certainly are norms likely to protect her textual self, or at least there should be).
- 13.
One thing which is of importance, which I neglected to say, is that in addition to the messages projected by the ironic utterance (and its functions), the ironic segment projects some strong presuppositions. The speaker says this, albeit ironically, because he is firmly persuaded that there are people who would say things like this. If nobody really said things like this, using an ironic utterance of this type would be terribly uneconomical because it would put the hearer to heavy processing efforts with no purpose. Although I admit this is not the standard way of discussing and explaining presuppositions, Macagno and I (2016) have written a paper in which we dwelled on the interaction between presupposition and implicature (or explicature). I do not want to say that such considerations are conclusive, but our example here seems to be a demonstration that we are on the right path. Presuppositions are clearly things which are at issue in this kind of discourse and the aim of the utterance is to exorcise them in one way or the other. On the one hand the utterance invokes presuppositions, on the other hand its aim is to reverse them.
- 14.
Or paranoid.
- 15.
We infer this through inference.
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Capone, A. (2016). Reporting Non-serious Speech. In: The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports . Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41078-4_6
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