The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports and Slurring
According to Volosinov (1971 ) there is a tension between two indirect discourse practices; one in which the reported message’s integrity is preserved and the boundaries between the main message and the embedded reported message are formally marked and on
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Abstract According to Volosinov (1971) there is a tension between two indirect discourse practices; one in which the reported message’s integrity is preserved and the boundaries between the main message and the embedded reported message are formally marked and one in which such boundaries are dissolved as the reporting context allows the reporting speaker to intrude to a greater extent and transform the message by stylistic interpolations. This tension is clearly resolved, in the context of my paper on indirect reports, through the recognition of pragmatic principles which assign default interpretations (according to which the boundaries between the reporting message and the reported message are clearly visible and the reported speaker’s voice prevails at least within the embedded message), while allowing context to create priorities which override the default interpretations and make the otherwise costly violations of the pragmatic principles worthwhile thanks to the facilitation and subordination of the information flow to the exigencies of the embedding context (Of course, this tension is clearly instantiated in language (it is not only a theoretical problem). As a referee points out, we are focusing on a case in which two practices are in tension. The resolution of a tension between two different, possibly opposite, practices clearly depends on practical considerations leading the language users to prefer one to the other. Deviation from a practice that conforms to ideal principles of use must always involve a cost that needs to be offset by practical advantages. One of these advantages could be the facilitation of the recognition of a referent. Another possible advantage could be, as happens in many cases, the simultaneous utterance of a speech report and a criticism).
A. Capone (&) University of Messina/Palermo, San Francesco P 107 98051 Barcellona, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 2, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_6, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
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1 Introduction The practice of indirect reporting involves a mixture of serious and non-serious use, as this practice, on the one hand, involves transformations in the sense of Goffman (1974),1 on the other hand it involves using language in the context of a serious activity, such as describing what another person said. The practice of indirect reporting is sensitive to contextual information and, thus, it goes without saying that the richer the cues and clues allowing speakers to interpret transformations (see Dascal and Weizman 1987), the more complex are the transformations involved in the indirect reports. And the more complex the transformations are, the greater the need for a decoupling principle along the lines of Clark and Gerrig (1990): Speakers intend their addressees to recognize different aspects of their quotations as depictive, supportive, and annotative. Mutatis mutandis, we ca
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