Indirect Reports and Societal Pragmatics

Abstract

Indirect reports are segments of speech which involve a dialogic dimension (clearly constituting a case of polyphony) and, thus, studying them offers a chance for linguistics to again appropriate its original status as a theory that deals with linguistic signs and communication. The practice of indirect reporting intersects with a theory of knowledge because, through an indirect report, knowledge is imparted on the basis of which the hearer will decide whether or not to act and how he should take action. In this chapter, I discuss the issue of opacity and try to defend a pragmatic view of opacity in connection with indirect reports (on the other hand, I believe that opacity in direct quotation is mainly a semantic issue). I try to explain opacity pragmatically, although I accept that there are numerous exceptions that one has to account for (namely, the replacement of NPs with the aim of facilitating the establishment of reference). In this chapter, I also consider the issue of slurs in terms of the opacity of a pragmatic form, and I then accept that we have to consider the societal constraints on the use/mention of slurs (more or less as exceptions to the application of pragmatic opacity).

For this essay, a report is X’s re-presentation to Y of what Z said. It is often the case that Z is identical with X at some earlier time. Occasionally, Y and X are the same person, but that is of little interest in this essay. X’s report is never exactly identical with Z’s utterance; even if the same words are captured, the context is different, the voice will be different, the speaker’s intentions may be different, the medium may be different. Often X will choose to render the report more coherent by rearranging what was said, and/or more vivid by embellishing the original to attract and/or maintain audience attention. When X’s report ρ is compared with Z’s utterance v, the accuracy of ρ depends on whether or not Z’s message in v can be reconstructed from it. In other words, the content of ρ is dependent on the content of v. An accurate report ρ re-presents the illocutionary point of the source utterance v.

(Allan 2016, 211–212).