Abstract
This chapter briefly introduces the concept of ‘indirect report’, starting with a discussion on Frege’s notion of ‘sense’ and the follow-up elaborations in this regard. The main objective of this chapter is to provide a general picture of the complexities revolving around indirect reports. To set the scene for a more elaborate coverage on the issue of indirect reporting, this chapter prepares the readers for a better understanding of philosophical, social, and cognitive issues revolving around the topic. This chapter also manifests the outline of the whole book. On this account, this chapter opens the window for a wider outlook into the book. This chapter also guides the readers to be more selective in their readings. That said, for fully grasping the brief discussions made in this chapter, the reader can refer to the next chapters to find out more elaborations and examples on relevant issues.
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- 1.
In line with Anderson (2016, p. 255), substituting co-referential expressions may affect the truth-value of the utterance. Opacity focuses on simple sentences (Clark Kent went into the phone booth and Superman went out). We normally expect simple sentences not to be opaque, yet apparently (according to some authors) some simple sentences, known as ‘Superman sentences’, have the potentiality to be opaque. Opacity is normally relevant to embedding in a verb of propositional content through a complementiser (Morady Moghaddam, 2018).
- 2.
When we say ‘the cat is on the mat’, the word ‘cat’ is being used, for it refers to something other than itself (Saka, 2017). On the other hand, in ‘the word cat has three letters’, the italic word is being mentioned because the word does not refer to any particular cat. It is the concept of the word that is important.
- 3.
Frames are individuals’ experiences, based on Erving Goffman. As argued by Goffman (1974, p. 155), frames are conceptualised as “the organization of experience or the structure of experience individuals have at any moment of their social lives.” Likewise, Fairclough (2013, p. 41) states that “the institution provides them (the members) with a frame for action, without which they could not act, but it thereby constrains them to act within that frame.”
- 4.
In this regard, Capone (2012, p. 609) argues that “the picture of indirect reporting which does not consider transformations, voicing, cues and clues is deeply flawed.”
- 5.
Further to this discussion, the different interpretations in (2b) and (3b) lead us to denounce the premiss made by the Parallelism Principle, hence advocating François Recanati’s contextualist standpoint in virtue of adhering to the fact that “the propositional content of an utterance depends on the context and not just on the linguistic meaning of the sentence” (Recanati, 2004, p. 158). In consonance with Recanati, proponents of Parallelism Principle believe that “a variation of propositional content has to be accounted for in terms of a variation in linguistic meaning” (2004, p. 158).
- 6.
In this regard, Capone (2010, p. 378) argues that “indirect reports are language games whereby in reporting that P, the speaker offers two voices: the current speakers’ own, and that of the original speaker. The reporter does not take responsibility for the latter’s embedded voice.”
- 7.
In dramaturgical performance, Goffman (1956) differentiates between three stages as front, back, and outside. He puts forward that in each ‘region’, individuals behave in a certain way that matches a particular setting. On the front stage, the focus is on the audience. The speaker knows that he or she is being watched and acts in a way to impress the audience. In this kind of interaction, the interlocutors wear different masks during interaction. On the back stage, on the other hand, the performer can relax because there is no observant. The only important thing to satisfy is the self. On the outside stage, the actor meets the audience members independently and the individuals are not involved in the performance.
- 8.
Capone (2016, p. 4) argues that “[a]n utterance is usually produced with a speaker’s intention and it is the job of the hearer to reconstruct what the speaker meant in that context (as well as in a default context).”
- 9.
As Chomsky (2004) states: “The biolinguistic perspective views a person’s language in all of its aspects – sound, meaning, structure—as a state of some component of the mind.”
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Morady Moghaddam, M. (2019). Preliminaries. In: The Praxis of Indirect Reports. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14269-8_1
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