This monograph on indirect reports offers insights on the semantics/pragmatics interface and a refinement of the notion of explicature. The volume is written in an engaging style and guides the reader through the theoretical problems and their ramifications. The thorniest problem in the study of indirect reports is their polyphonic nature, and how the listener distinguishes between the reporter’s voice and the original speaker’s voice, either by contextual clues or, in the absence of such clues, by resorting to pragmatic principles. The introductory chapter discusses the main issues that will be addressed in the volume. The next chapters focus on the various aspects of indirect reports, covering both theory and practical applications.

This volume offers the reader a singular overview of current thinking on indirect reports. The contributors are eminent researchers from the fields of philosophy of language, theoretical linguistics and communication theory, who answer questions on this important issue. This exciting area of controversy has until now mostly been treated from the viewpoint of philosophy. This volume adds the views from semantics, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics. Authors address matters such as the issue of semantic minimalism vs. radical contextualism, the attribution of responsibility for the modes of presentation associated with Noun Phrases and how to distinguish the indirect reporter’s responsibility from the original speaker’s responsibility. They also explore the connection between indirect reporting and direct quoting. Clearly indirect reporting has some bearing on the semantics/pragmatics debate, however, there is much controversy on “what is said”, whether this is a minimal semantic logical form (enriched by saturating pronominals) or a much richer and fully contextualized logical form. This issue will be discussed from several angles. Many of the authors are contextualists and the discussion brings out the need to take context into account when one deals with indirect reports, both the context of the original utterance and the context of the report. It is interesting to see how rich cues and clues can radically transform the reported message, assigning illocutionary force and how they can be mobilized to distinguish several voices in the utterance. Decoupling the voice of the reporting speaker from that of the reported speaker on the basis of rich contextual clues is an important issue that pragmatic theory has to tackle. Articles on the issue of slurs will bring new light to the issue of decoupling responsibility in indirect reporting, while others are theoretically oriented and deal with deep problems in philosophy and epistemology.

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque.

This book discusses the concept of indirect reporting in relation to sociopragmatic, philosophical, and cognitive factors. In addition, it deals with several state-of-the-art topics with regard to indirect reports, such as trust, politeness, refinery and photosynthetic processes and cognitive features. The book presents socio-cognitive accounts of indirect reports that take into consideration Grice’s Cooperation Principle and Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory. It discusses direct and indirect reports and their similarities and differences, with a focus on the neglected role of the hearer in indirect reports. It presents an extensive comparison of translation and indirect reports (with a detailed discussion on reporting/translating slurring), and examines politeness issues and the role of trust. It deals with the main principles governing the use and interpretation of indirect reports (among them, the Principle of Commitment and the Principle of Immunity). Finally, the book discusses the idea of ‘common core’ and cross-cultural studies in reported speech and illustrates by means of an analysis of Persian reported speech, how subjectivity and uncertainty are presented among Persian speakers.

This book is about the pragmatics of language and it illustrates how pragmatics transcends the boundaries of linguistics. This volume covers Gricean pragmatics as well as topics including: conversation and collective belief, the norm of assertion, speech acts, what a context is, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and implicature and explicature, pragmatics and epistemology, the pragmatics of belief, quotation, negation, implicature and argumentation theory, Habermas’ Universal Pragmatics, Dascal’s theory of the dialectical self, theories and theoretical discussions on the nature of pragmatics from a philosophical point of view. Conversational implicatures are generally meaning augmentations on top of explicatures, whilst explicatures figure prominently in what is said. Discussions in this work reveal their characteristics and tensions within current theories relating to explicatures and implicatures. Authors show that explicatures and implicatures are calculable and not (directly) tied to conventional meaning. Pragmatics has a role to play in dealing with philosophical problems and this volume presents research that defines boundaries and gives a stable picture of pragmatics and philosophy. World renowned academic experts in philosophy and pragmalinguistics ask important theoretical questions and interact in a way that can be easily grasped by those from disciplines other than philosophy, such as anthropology, literary theory and law. A second volume in this series is also available, which covers the perspective of linguists who have been influenced by philosophy.

This book shows how pragmatics and philosophy are interconnected, and explores the consequences and ramifications of this innovative idea, especially in addressing and solving the problem of breaking Grice's circle. The author applies philosophy in order to get to a better understanding of pragmatics, and pragmatics in order to get a better understanding of philosophy. The book starts with a chapter on the non-cancellability of explicatures and the role that this idea plays in the resolution of Grice’s circle, and proceeds with the discussion of other topics in which explicatures or cancellability play an important and decisive role. While the reader proceeds in the reading of this book, they accumulate notions and pieces of knowledge which will be of invaluable use when arriving at the chapter on conversational presuppositions (and related chapters), where the author expresses his most radical views: namely that (potential) presuppositions are indeed cancellable, contrary to what many believe.

This monograph on indirect reports offers insights on the semantics/pragmatics interface and a refinement of the notion of explicature. The volume is written in an engaging style and guides the reader through the theoretical problems and their ramifications. The thorniest problem in the study of indirect reports is their polyphonic nature, and how the listener distinguishes between the reporter’s voice and the original speaker’s voice, either by contextual clues or, in the absence of such clues, by resorting to pragmatic principles. The introductory chapter discusses the main issues that will be addressed in the volume. The next chapters focus on the various aspects of indirect reports, covering both theory and practical applications.