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Weak speech reports

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Abstract

Indirect speech reports can be true even if they attribute to the speaker the saying of something weaker than what she in fact expressed, yet not all weakenings of what the speaker expressed yield true reports. For example, if Anna utters ‘Bob and Carla passed the exam’, we can accurately report her as having said that Carla passed the exam, but we can not accurately report her as having said that either it rains or it does not, or that either Carla passed the exam or pandas are cute. This paper offers an analysis of speech reports that distinguishes weakenings of what the speaker expressed that yield true reports from weakenings that do not. According to this analysis, speech reports are not only sensitive to the informational content of what the speaker expressed, but also to the possibilities a speaker raises in making an utterance. As I argue, this analysis has significant advantages over its most promising competitors, including views based on work by Barwise and Perry (J Philos 78(11): 668–691, 1981), views appealing to recent work on the notion of content parthood by Fine (J Philos Log 45(2):199–226, 2016) and Yablo (Aboutness. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2014), and Richard’s (Mind Lang 13(4): 605–616, 1998) proposal appealing to structured propositions.

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Notes

  1. For example, Brasoveanu and Farkas (2007) state that “speech act reporting verbs in general assert the existence of a speech act whose author is the referent of the subject of the reporting verb, and whose linguistic content has to ‘match’ the content of the complement of the report” (p. 11), but they do not cash out the “matching” relation they appeal to. Sæbø (2013), who thinks the phenomenon should somehow be accounted for by appeal to background knowledge, acknowledges the state of the discussion when he says “it appears to be still an open question how much and what kind of implicit information is admissible to bridge a gap in strength between a speech report and its source” (p. 286).

  2. I say a “suitable reconstruction” for two reasons. The first is that the embedded sentence may involve the use of indexicals that were not used in the original sentence. In such cases, it should suffice that the indexicals as they occur in the embedded sentence be replaced by indexicals that refer to the same objects, but whose use would sound natural when uttered by the person whose speech is being reported. The second reason is that ‘and’ and ‘or’ can coordinate subsentential components, such as nouns, predicates, and verbs, as in ‘Anna and John sing or dance’. In those cases, there is no fragment of the sentence that is itself a sentence which we could replace for ‘q’ in the schema from the main text. In some of those cases, we can distribute the coordinated material through the rest of the material in the sentence, as in ‘Anna sings or dances, and John sings or dances’, or ‘Anna sings or Anna dances and John sings or John dances’. Each of the sentences ‘Anna sings’, ‘Anna dances’, ‘John sings’, and ‘John dances’, would be a suitable reconstruction of a fragment of ‘Anna and John sing or dance’ to replace ‘q’ in the schema from the main text. Note that ‘and’ and ‘or’ coordination of subsentential components can’t always be eliminated in the way I just described. For example, it does not make sense to reconstruct ‘Anna and John are a team’ as ‘Anna is a team and John is a team’.

  3. Based on Cappelen and Lepore’s (1997) example 9.

  4. Certain readings of sentences like (5c) and (5d) may ring true. Those readings express the reporter’s ignorance as to what the reportee said. For example, (5d) may be read as saying that Anna said that Carla punched Bob or Anna said that Carla kicked Bob (though the reporter may not know which one). Call this kind of reading an ignorance reading. I will not be concerned with ignorance readings throughout this paper. The readings I am interested in are those in which the reporter attributes to the reportee a saying of the semantic content of the report’s complement clause.

  5. Keep in mind that being in LA does not entail being in California. This is why the clause embedded in (8d) is not, strictly speaking, a weakening of (8), and, in turn, why (8d) is information-sensitive rather than weak.

  6. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing the following case to my attention. If, in the context of a conversation in which everybody knows that exactly one of Bob and Carla will come to the party, Anna utters ‘Bob won’t come to the party’, it may not sound too odd to report Anna as having said that Carla will come to the party. Such a report would count as an information-sensitive report, just as (8d). I hope to discuss information-sensitive reports in future work.

  7. An anonymous reviewer has expressed skepticism that the distinction between information-sensitive and weak reports cuts a joint in semantic and psychological theorizing. Readers who share this worry may think of the distinction as a methodological assumption. Even if there is no fundamental difference between weak and information-sensitive reports, making the distinction will allow us to make progress in the study of these kinds of reports.

  8. Sentences written in this font stand for propositions.

  9. Another way to think of situations is as partial models for the sentences in a given language; i.e. as partial functions from the sentences of that language to truth-values.

  10. The availability of this finer-grained notion of entailment and a similarly fine-grained notion of equivalence is one of the advantages Barwise and Perry (1981, pp. 676–677) originally claimed for situationist semantics over possible-worlds semantics.

  11. Following Kaplan (1989), throughout this paper I take contexts to be sequences of indices which, in conjunction with the character of a context-dependent expression, determine that expression’s content.

  12. I take a Hintikka-style semantics for speech reports fo be an example of such a semantics. According to a Hintikka-style semantics, a report is true just in attributes to the speaker the saying of a proposition which is true in every world compatible with what the speaker semantically expressed. See Hintikka (1969) for an application to the semantics of belief reports.

  13. Cf. Yablo (2014, p. 46). Yablo states the first of the requirements in terms of entailment, but his requirement is entailed by (i) as stated in the main text. My objection does not depend on this difference. Fine (2016, pp. 206–207) omits the third of these requirements, but my objection does not depend on that requirement.

  14. Note that this notion of containment goes the other way around from the standard set-theoretical notion of inclusion: where \(s, s'\) are sets, s includes \(s'\) iff \(s'\) is a subset of s, whereas, in the sense relevant to (11), scontains\(s'\) iff s is a subset of \(s'\).

  15. I’m assuming binary branching for simplicity. ‘Conj’ stands for the syntactic category that includes words like ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘but’, and so on.

  16. There is an extensive literature on the semantic content of ‘and’. One possibility is that the semantic content of ‘and’ is just set intersection, in which case the semantic contents of ‘Anna’ and ‘Bob’ could be treated as sets of properties (following Montague 1974). Another possibility, which Champollion (2016) attributes to Winter (1995, 1998), is to treat the semantic content of ‘and’ as a function that forms an ordered pair with its arguments as elements (e.g. \(\lambda y x.\langle x, y\rangle\)); as Champollion puts it, according to this view, “when such a pair combines with other items in the tree, it is first propagated upwards in a style reminiscent of alternative semantics [...] At any point in the derivation, this ordered pair can be collapsed back into a single denotation by covert application of Intersection on its two members.” (p. 36). For example, in a sentence like (1) the semantic content of ‘Bob and Carla’ would be the ordered pair \(\langle\)Bob, Carla\(\rangle\). That semantic content combines with the semantic content of ‘passed the exam’ to form the ordered pair \(\langle \{w:\)Bob passed the exam in \(w\},\{w:\)Carla passed the exam in \(w\}\rangle\). Applying intersection to the members of that pair, we get the set of possible worlds in which Bob and Carla passed the exam. See Champollion (2016) for further discussion and a positive proposal on a univocal semantic content for ‘and’.

  17. Richard (1990) attributes something like this way of cashing out DET to Cresswell (1985) and criticizes him on that basis, so this way of understanding DET is probably not what Richard had in mind. Another way of cashing out DET is presented below which may fit Richard’s intentions better.

  18. Repeated here:

    1. (6a)

      Anna said that cardinals are red.

    2. (6b)

      Anna said that cardinals are some color.

    3. (7a)

      Anna said she will be here soon.

    4. (7b)

      Anna said she will be here within 10 min.

    5. (7c)

      Anna said she will be here before 6 pm.

  19. This is closer to Richard’s (1990, 1998) position.

  20. Note that, on pain of making the wrong prediction with respect to sentences like (7b), it won’t help to claim that the required necessitation relation must hold between the semantic values of individual words—i.e. that in order for a proposition to DET another, the semantic value of every unstructured constituent (e.g. red, crimson, cerulean) of the DETed proposition must be necessitated by the semantic value of an unstructured constituent in the DETing proposition. Above we saw that (7b), the report ‘Anna will be here within 10 min’ uttered at 2:55 pm truly reports Anna’s utterance of (7)—‘I’ll be there at 3 pm’. Yet there is no sense in which any of the unstructured constituents of the structured content of the expression ‘within 10 min’ is necessitated by any of the unstructured constituents of the structured content of ‘at 3 pm’.

  21. See Champollion (2016) for a brief summary of the empirical evidence against the ambiguity of ‘and’.

  22. E.g. if the phrase structure of ‘Bob is tall and fat’ is [S[NP[NBob]] [VP [V is] [AP[Atall] [[Conjand] [Afat]]]]], the phrase structure of ‘Bob is tall or fat’ should be [S[NP[NBob]] [VP [V is] [AP[Atall] [[Conjor] [Afat]]]]].

  23. (33) is due to Hamblin (1973), and the clause for conjunction is adapted from Groenendijk and Roelofsen (2009) so as to fit Hamblin’s clause for disjunction. The clause for negation is adapted from Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002). See Alonso-Ovalle (2006) for extensive discussion of disjunction in a Hamblin-style semantics. There are subtle differences between Hamblin’s approach (adopted here) and a similar approach recently developed by inquisitive semanticists. I discuss those differences in footnote 26.

  24. I’m restricting my attention to the language of sentential logic, but we can use the composition rule proposed by Hamblin (1973) to develop a fully compositional system for natural language. The composition rule Hamblin proposed is:

    • If \(\llbracket \alpha \rrbracket \subseteq D_{\langle \sigma ,\tau \rangle }\) and \(\llbracket \beta \rrbracket \subseteq D_{\sigma }\), then \(\llbracket \alpha (\beta )\rrbracket =\{ c\in D_{\tau } : \exists a\in \llbracket \alpha \rrbracket . \exists b\in \llbracket \beta \rrbracket .\, c=a(b)\}\)

    In a Hamblin semantics, expressions denote sets of objects of the type they standardly denote in a standard Montagovian semantics, and the English word ‘or’ denotes the operation of set union. For example, take the sentence ‘Anna or Bob run’. In a Hamblin semantics, he semantic content of ‘Anna or Bob’ will be the set whose members are the singleton of Anna and the singleton of Bob; that semantic content will combine with the semantic content of ‘run’—presumably, the property of running—to form a set with two sets of possible worlds as its members: the set of possible worlds in which Anna runs, and the set of possible worlds in which Bob runs.

  25. It is worth noting the formal connections between this approach and the approach using the notion of content parthood I discussed in the previous section. If we eliminate the clause on falsitymakers in (11), adopt a treatment on which truthmakers are sets of possible worlds, and assume that an atomic sentence’s only truthmaker is the set of possible worlds in which that proposition is true (e.g. that the only truthmaker for ‘cardinals are red’ is the set of possible worlds in which cardinals are red), then (37) is equivalent to (10). I take the main advantages of the present approach to be philosophical, rather than formal: whereas it might be difficult to justify the claim that the only truthmaker for a sentence like ‘cardinals are red’ is the set of possible worlds in which cardinals are red (as opposed to the set of possible worlds in which cardinals are crimsoon, the set of worlds in which cardenals are scarlet, and so on), there is no analogous difficulty in claiming that an utterance of ‘cardinals are red’ makes salient the possibility that cardinals are red without making salient the more specific possibilities that cardinals are crimson or that cardinals are scarlet.

  26. We can get the clauses for conjunction, negation, and disjunction used in inquisitive semantics simply by applying the function ALT(\(\varGamma\)) = \(\{\alpha \in \varGamma : \text {for\,no\,}\beta \in \varGamma , \alpha \subset \beta \}\) to clauses (31)–(34)(see e.g. Groenendijk and Roelofsen 2009). So, for example, the inquisitive clause for disjunction is \(\llbracket \phi \vee \psi \rrbracket _{\text {INQ}} = \text {ALT}\llbracket \phi \vee \psi \rrbracket\), where \(\llbracket \phi \vee \psi \rrbracket\) is defined as in (33). In certain cases, the difference between the two clauses makes a difference in (37)’s predictions. For example, suppose Anna utters ‘cardinals are red’, and consider the report ‘Anna said that cardinals are crimson or red’. Using the clause for disjunction from the main text—i.e. (33)—we predict this report is false. For, according to that clause, the content of ‘cardinals are crimson or red’ is the set containing the set of worlds in which cardinals are crimson and the set in which they are red. Since the set of worlds in which cardinals are red is not included in the set of worlds in which cardinals are crimson, (37) predicts the report to be false. In contrast, using the inquisitive clause for disjunction, we get the prediction that the same report is true. Since the set of worlds in which cardinals are crimson is a proper subset of the set of worlds in which they are red, according to the inquisitive clause for disjunction the content of ‘cardinals are crimson or red’ is the singleton set of the set of worlds in which cardinals are red. Thus, according to the inquisitive clause, the content of ‘cardinals are crimson or red’ is exactly the same as that of ‘cardinals are red’, which yields the prediction that ‘Anna said that cardinals are crimson or red’ accurately reports Anna’s utterance of ‘cardinals are red’. I take this to be the wrong result, which speaks in favor of the clauses used in the main text—i.e. (31)–(34)—as opposed to the clauses from inquisitive semantics.

  27. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing the following two cases to my attention. Consideration of those cases led to revision of a previous proposal.

  28. Note that, if Anna did not semantically express (49) by uttering ‘yes’, we can modify the present account so as to define the truth of a report in terms of what the speaker asserted. In such a case, assuming that Anna asserted (49) through her utterance of ‘yes’, the modified view would predict that (48) is true.

  29. An anonymous reviewer has kindly called my attention to an interesting interaction between focus and the present account of weak reports. As the reviewer points out, the present account of weak reports could explain why Bob’s report seems infelicitous in the following example:

    1. Anna:

      I’m surprised that John MARRIED Bertha for the money.

    2. Bob:

      Anna said that she’s surprised that John married BERTHA for the money.

    For example, suppose that the focus content of Anna’s utterance is the alternative proposition consisting of the set of worlds in which John married Bertha for the money and the set of worlds in which John merely dated Bertha for the money. In addition, suppose that the focus content of the sentence embedded in John’s report is the alternative proposition consisting of the set of worlds in which John married Bertha for the money and the set of worlds in which John married Carla for the money (see e.g. Rooth 1992 for an influential approach to the semantics of focus). Then, since not every set in the former is a subset of a set in the latter, the present view predicts that Bob’s report is false. I am grateful from the reviewer’s observation, and hope to discuss the interaction between focus and the present theory of weak reports in future work.

  30. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing these cases to my attention. According to my account, (54) is true because Anna’s utterance of (6) makes salient the possibility that cardinals are crimson, which entails both that cardinals are crimson and that cardinals are red. Thus, every possibility made salient by Anna’s utterance entails a possibility (54)’s that-clause makes salient, and every possibility made salient by (54) is entailed by a possibility Anna’s utterance makes salient. The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for (54), since the possibility that cardinals are crimson entails both that cardinals are crimson and that cardinals are not scarlet. Note that, as observed in footnote 26, my view predicts that (54) is false when taken as a report of ‘cardinals are red’. Intuitively, this corresponds to the idea that Anna did not make salient the possibility that cardinals are crimson by uttering ‘cardinals are red’.

  31. See footnote 2 for elaboration on what a suitable reconstruction is.

  32. As Chierchia et. al. report, Gazdar proposed for a weakening of Hurford’s constraint so as to account for apparent failures of Hurford’s original observation involving scalar implicatures. According to Gazdar’s weakening, “a sentence containing a disjunctive phrase ‘S or T’ is infelicitous if S entails T or if T entails S, unless T contradicts the conjunction of S and the implicatures of S.” Chierchia et al. (2016b, p. 49, my emphasis). See Champollion et al. (2016b) for compelling arguments in favor of the stronger formulation of Hurford’s constraint, and Katzir and Singh (2014), Ciardelli and Roelofsen (2017) for further implementations of Champollion et al. (2016b)’s approach to Hurford’s constraint. Here I will follow Champollion et al. (2016b), Katzir and Singh (2014), and Ciardelli and Roelofsen (2017) in thinking that scalar implicatures should receive a grammatical implementation, and that Hurford’s constraint holds in its strongest formulation.

  33. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on these issues and for bringing cases like (64c) and (64d) to my attention.

  34. See Alonso-Ovalle (2009) and von Fintel (2011) for discussion.

  35. The clause is adapted from Alonso-Ovalle (2009, pp. 216–18)’s work on counterfactuals. See also Champollion et al. (2016a) and Fine (2012) for alternative clauses that implement the same general idea. See Groenendijk and Roelofsen (2009) for a clause for conditionals in an inquisitive framework.

  36. See Lewis (1973), Stalnaker (1999b) and Kratzer (2012a) for discussion. According to Stalnaker, the difference between indicative and counterfactual conditionals is only that the antecedent of a counterfactual conditional is presupposed to be false, while the antecedent of an indicative conditional is not.

  37. Here is the derivation. A letter in bold denotes the set of possible worlds in which the sentence the letter represents is true. So, for example, \(\mathbf{B }\) stands for the set \(\{w:B{\text {\,is\,true\,in\,}}w\}\).

    $$\begin{aligned} \llbracket (B\vee C) > D\rrbracket&= \{\gamma :\text {for\,some\,}\beta \in \llbracket D\rrbracket , \gamma =\bigcup \{\gamma \,':\text {for\,all\, }\alpha \in \llbracket B\vee C\rrbracket , \gamma \,'\subseteq (\alpha \rightarrow \beta )\}\}\\&= \{\gamma : \text {for\,some\,}\beta \in \{\mathbf{D }\}, \gamma = \bigcup \{\gamma \,' :\text {for\,all\,} \alpha \in \llbracket B\rrbracket \cup \llbracket C\rrbracket , \gamma \,'\subseteq (\alpha \rightarrow \beta )\} \}\\&= \{\gamma : \text {for\,some\,}\beta \in \{\mathbf{D }\}, \gamma = \bigcup \{\gamma \,':\text {for\,all\,}\alpha \in \{\mathbf{B }, \mathbf{C }\}, \gamma \,':\subseteq (\alpha \rightarrow \beta )\}\}\\&= \bigcup \{\gamma : \gamma \subseteq (\mathbf{B }\rightarrow \mathbf{D })\text {\,and\,}\gamma \subseteq (\mathbf{C }\rightarrow \mathbf{D })\}\\&=(\mathbf{B }\rightarrow \mathbf{D })\cap (\mathbf{C }\rightarrow \mathbf{D }) \end{aligned}$$

  38. Here is the derivation:

    $$\begin{aligned} \llbracket (B\vee C) > (D\vee E)\rrbracket&= \{\gamma : \text {for\,some\,}\beta \in \llbracket D\vee E\rrbracket , \gamma =\bigcup \{\gamma \, ': \text {for\,all\,}\alpha \in \llbracket B\vee C\rrbracket , \gamma \, ' \subseteq (\alpha \rightarrow \beta )\}\} \\&= \{\gamma : \text {for\,some\,}\beta \in \llbracket D\rrbracket \cup \llbracket E\rrbracket , \gamma = \bigcup \{\gamma \,' :\text {for\,all\,} \alpha \in \llbracket B\rrbracket \cup \llbracket C\rrbracket , \gamma \,'\subseteq (\alpha \rightarrow \beta )\} \}\\&= \{\gamma : \text {for\,some\,}\beta \in \{\mathbf{D }, \mathbf{E }\}, \gamma =\bigcup \{\gamma \,':\text {for\,all\,}\alpha \in \{\mathbf{B }, \mathbf{C }\}, \gamma \,'\subseteq (\alpha \rightarrow \beta )\}\}\\&= \{\bigcup \{\gamma ':\text {for\,all\,}\alpha \in \{\mathbf{B }, \mathbf{C }\}, \gamma \,'\subseteq (\alpha \rightarrow \mathbf{D })\}, \bigcup \{\gamma ':\text {for\,all\,}\alpha \in \{\mathbf{B }, \mathbf{C }\}, \gamma \,'\subseteq (\alpha \rightarrow \mathbf{E })\}\}\\&= \{ (\mathbf{B }\rightarrow \mathbf{D })\cap (\mathbf{C }\rightarrow \mathbf{D }), (\mathbf{B }\rightarrow \mathbf{E })\cap (\mathbf{C }\rightarrow \mathbf{E })\} \end{aligned}$$

  39. Repeated here:

    1. (37)

      \(\llbracket\)A said that \(\phi \rrbracket ^{c, w} = T\) if and only if, for some set \(\varGamma\) of alternative propositions each of which A semantically expressed in w,

      1. (i)

        For every \(\alpha \in \bigwedge \varGamma\), there is \(\beta \in \llbracket \phi \rrbracket ^{c}\) such that \(\alpha \subseteq \beta\), and

      2. (ii)

        For every \(\beta \in \llbracket \phi \rrbracket ^{c}\), there is \(\alpha \in \bigwedge \varGamma\) such that \(\alpha \subseteq \beta\).

  40. An anonymous reviewer has kindly called my attention to the following case. Suppose Anna utters ‘if Bob comes to the party, Dan will come to the party’. The report ‘Anna said that if Bob comes to the party, then Dan will come to the party or 2 + 2 = 4’ seems inaccurate. However, the present view predicts it to be true. A full discussion of the present case falls out of the scope of this paper, but I would like to point out that the use of possible situations, as opposed to possible worlds, can be of help with this case. In particular, one could adopt a view of conditionals similar to the one adopted by Fine (2012). According to Fine, the counterfactual ‘if P had been the case, then Q would have been the case’ is true at a given possible world just in case every possible outcome of a situation that makes P true (i.e. every possible situation that results from adding to the world a situation that makes P true) contains a situation that makes Q true. Now, at least in principle, we can define the truth of a conditional at a possible situation (as opposed to at a possible world) as follows: P\(\rightarrow _F\)Q is true in a situation s just in case every possible situation that results from adding a situation in which P is true to s contains a situation that makes Q true. This, together with a reformulation of semantic contents in terms of situations rather than in terms of possible worlds (see above, Sect. 5.1), would allow the present view to make the right prediction in this case. That is, on the assumption that there is at least one situation s such that adding a situation in which Bob comes to the party to s contains a situation in which Dan comes to the party, but not a situation in which 2 + 2 = 4, the set of situations in which the conditional ‘Bob comes to the party \(\rightarrow _F\) Dan comes to the party’ is true is not a subset of the set of situations in which the conditional ‘Bob comes to the party \(\rightarrow _F\) 2 + 2 = 4’ is true. I hope to explore this approach in future work.

  41. Note that presuppositions here can be thought of either as semantic or as pragmatic presuppositions. An utterance’s semantic presuppositions (see e.g. van Fraassen 1968) are the propositions that are true whenever the utterance is true or false. Given this definition, (74) and (75) are presumably reports which attribute to Anna the saying of things she semantically presupposed. An utterance’s pragmatic presuppositions, on the other hand, are the propositions the speaker assumed, and assumed that the other participants in the conversation assumed, in the context of the conversation in which the utterance was produced (see e.g Stalnaker 1999a). For example, if, in the context of the conversation in which Anna utters ‘John is a bachelor’ Anna assumes (and assumes that her interlocutors assume) that John is a man, then Anna pragmatically presupposes that John is a man when making her utterance. Accordingly, the present view predicts that the report ‘Anna said that John is a man’ is false, since it attributes to Anna the saying of something entailed by something she merely presupposed in expressing the alternative proposition that John is a bachelor.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Cian Dorr, Dan Hoek, Annette Martin, Jim Pryor, Stephen Schiffer, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to Sam Carter, Peter van Elswyk, Jane Grimshaw, Friederike Moltmann, Matt Moss, Gary Ostertag, and Erica Shumener for helpful discussion during the workshop on the semantics of embedded sentences at NYU (May 2017).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, New York University, 5 Washington Pl., New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Martín Abreu Zavaleta

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Correspondence to Martín Abreu Zavaleta.

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Abreu Zavaleta, M. Weak speech reports. Philos Stud 176, 2139–2166 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1119-2

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