يناقش البحث إحدى روافد مشكلة المعنى، أو بالأحرى لإحدى مشكلاتها الفرعية التي ألقت بظلالها على معالجات الفلاسفة، لا لطبيعة المعنى فحسب، ولكن أيضًا لشروط صدق أية جملة في اللغات الطبيعية، وما يتبع ذلك من إشكالات تتعلق باستخدام اللغة في كافة مواقفنا الحياتية تقريبًا. تلك هي مشكلة المؤشرات اللفظية ذات الدلالة المباشرة، وكيف يمكن أن تؤدى إلى تعيينٍ صحيح للمعنى حين تُنقل عن ألسنة الغير لتتحــول إلــى منطوقات غير مباشرة.

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: (i) that a semantic analysis of indirect reports is insufficient, (ii) 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, (iii) 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, (iv) that an analysis of reporting requires the pragmatic tools of metarepresentation and a social, inter-personal understanding of relevance and shared knowledge. (shrink)

In ancient Greek the line between direct and indirect discourse appears blurred. In this essay I examine the tendency of Greek writers to slip from indirect into direct speech. I explain the apparent difference between modern English and ancient Greek speech reporting in terms of a development from orality to literacy.

Can supervaluationism successfully handle indirect speech reports? This chapter considers, and rejects, Schiffer’s claim that they cannot. One alleged problem with indirect speech reports is that the truth of “Carla said that Bob is tall” implausibly requires that Carla said all of a huge number of precise things (i.e. that Bob was over n feet tall, for values of n corresponding to precisifications of “tall”). The paper shows why the supervaluationist is not committed to this. Vague (...) singular terms are no particular problem for supervaluationism within indirect speech reports, it is argued, but there remain some issues surrounding certain vague demonstratives. The supervaluationist has good responses available, however, and any remaining questions face all theories of vagueness and are more appropriately addressed within a theory of demonstratives rather than a theory of vagueness. (shrink)

This article presents a semantic analysis of indirect speech reports. The analysis aims to explain a combination of two phenomena. First, there are true utterances of sentences of the form α said that φ which are used to report an utterance u of a sentence wherein φ's content is not u's content. This implies that in uttering a single sentence, one can say several things. Second, when the complements of these reports (and indeed, these reports themselves) are placed (...) in conjunctions, the conjunctions are typically infelicitous. I argue that this combination of phenomena can be explained if speech reports report (perhaps contingent) parts of the contents of the sentences reported. (shrink)

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 : 668–691, 1981), views appealing to recent work on the notion of content parthood by Fine :199–226, 2016) and Yablo, and Richard’s : 605–616, 1998) proposal appealing to structured propositions. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to assess the general viability of Donald Davidson's paratactic theory of indirect discourse, as well as the specific plausibility of a reincarnated form of the Davidsonian paratactic theory, Gary Kemp's propositional paratactic theory. To this end I will provide an introduction to the Davidsonian paratactic theory and the theory's putative strengths, thereafter noting that an argument from ambiguity seems to effectively undermine Davidson's proposal. Subsequently, I will argue that Kemp's modification of Davidson's theory (...) – that is, Kemp's attempt to respond to the ambiguity objection – adequately handles the classic argument from ambiguity but fails in the face of a new problem of ambiguity that I will introduce. Finally, I will argue that there are more devastating and basic problems for the paratactic theory generally, and that even if Kemp's modifications had succeeded, they would not have given adequate plausibility to the paratactic proposal. (shrink)

This paper argues that the obvious validity of certain inferences involving indirect speech reports as premises and truth or falsity ascriptions as conclusions is incompatible with Davidson's so-called "paratactic" analysis of the logical form of indirect discourse. Besides disqualifying that analysis, this problem is also claimed to indicate that the analysis is doubly in tension with Davidson's metasemantic views. Specifically, it can be reconciled neither with one of Davidson's key assumptions regarding the adequacy of the kind of (...) semantic theory he recommends nor with one of his key assumptions regarding the inadequacy of a kind of semantic theory he rejects. (shrink)

The quotational theory of free indirect discourse postulates that pronouns and tenses are systematically unquoted. But where does this unquotation come from? Based on cases of apparent unquotation in direct discourse constructions (including data from Kwaza speakers, Catalan signers, and Dutch children), I suggest a general pragmatic answer: unquotation is essentially a way to resolve a conflict that arises between two opposing constraints. On the one hand, the reporter wants to use indexicals that refer directly to the most salient (...) speech act participants and their surroundings (Attraction). On the other hand, the semantics of direct discourse (formalized here in terms of event modification) entails the reproduction of referring expressions from the original utterance being reported (Verbatim). Unquotation (formalized here also in terms of event modification), allows the reporter to avoid potential conflicts between these constraints. Unquotation in free indirect discourse then comes out as a special case, where the salient source of attraction is the story protagonist and her actions, rather than the reporting narrator and his here and now. (shrink)

Contextualism in epistemology has traditionally been understood as the view that “know” functions semantically like an indexical term, encoding different contents in contexts with different epistemic standards. But the indexical hypothesis about “know” faces a range of objections. This article explores an alternative version of contextualism on which “know” is a semantically stable term, and the truth-conditional variability in knowledge claims is a matter of pragmatic enrichment. The central idea is that in contexts with stringent epistemic standards, knowledge claims are (...) narrowed: “know” is used in such contexts to make assertions about particularly demanding types of knowledge. The resulting picture captures all of the intuitive data that motivate contextualism while sidestepping the controversial linguistic thesis at its heart. After developing the view, the article shows in detail how it avoids one influential linguistic objection to traditional contextualism concerning indirect speech reports, and then answers an objection concerning the unavailability of certain types of clarification speeches. (shrink)

The term 'covert mixed quotation' describes cases in which linguistic material is interpreted in the manner of mixed quotation — that is, used in addition to being mentioned — despite the superficial absence of any commonly recognized conventional devices indicating quotation. After developing a novel theory of mixed quotation, I show that positing covert mixed quotation allows us to give simple and unified treatments of a number of puzzling semantic phenomena, including the projective behavior of conventional implicature items embedded in (...) indirect speech reports and propositional attitude ascriptions, so-called 'c-monsters,' metalinguistic negation, metalinguistic negotiation, and 'in a sense' constructions. (shrink)