Abstract
When choosing among various referring expressions, speakers typically choose a form that reflects the audience’s mental representation of the intended referent. For instance, a speaker will most likely use a definite rather than indefinite description when introducing an entity that the addressee can uniquely identify. However, also considerations other than referent accessibility and the mental state of the addressee may affect the choice of nominal form. For instance, in a speech report such as Mary asked whether he had seen a dog, the choice of the expression a dog is influenced by the speaker’s intention to truthfully report on what was originally communicated as well as considerations about the representation of the referent in the mental model of the present addressee—and more than one nominal form may be valid. This paper reports on a pen-and-pencil experiment conducted to test how specific indefinites are reported on in direct and indirect speech in the four languages Czech, English, German, and Norwegian. The experiment supports the claim that indirect speech allows for a wider range of nominal forms than direct speech when the speaker reports on a speech event that originally contained a specific indefinite. Nevertheless, the study shows that the subjects prefer to use an indefinite description to report on a specific indefinite in indirect speech, even though also other forms are valid. This suggests that speaker’s effort, and not only hearer’s processing cost, may be crucial for the choice of nominal form. The comparison of the four languages reveals that general cognitive constraints related to reference assignment interact with language-specific conditions; examples are constraints on discourse type and considerations of processing economy following from the language’s lexical and morpho-syntactic inventory.
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘referring expression’ is here used in a maximally general sense, denoting any noun phrase (NP) that can in principle introduce a discourse entity.
- 2.
For instance, full proper names seem to be used in more formal situations than first names across the four languages that we have investigated.
- 3.
- 4.
In some languages, such as Japanese, the direct-indirect speech distinction is not formally marked (see Maier 2009).
- 5.
We will only be concerned with direct and indirect speech in the shape of an interrogative complement clause to a verb of saying in the indicative mood, to the exclusion of so-called free indirect speech.
- 6.
Sæbø (2013) adds a footnote to the ‘referential report’ postulate, saying that the formulation is a bit simplistic: The indefinite description [a P] may be embedded, in which case the notation [a P] Q is inaccurate; and there is imprecision concerning whether the locution “can be represented” (what is intended is that the report is correct (true) under the substitution of u for [a P] if it is otherwise sufficiently faithful).
- 7.
The NP alternatives in Fig. 2 are not supposed to be exhaustive, and they presuppose a context where the entity referred to by the NP has been previously activated.
- 8.
According to Mulkern, the cognitive status associated with complex proper names is different from the one associated with simple ones. She shows that complex proper names such as Peter Simpson can be used in cases where the addressee is not previously familiar with the referent, whereas this is not the case for simple proper names such as Peter or Mr. Simpson. Thus, while simple proper names encode the cognitive status ‘familiar,’ according to Mulkern, complex proper names encode the cognitive status ‘uniquely identifiable,’ just like the definite article in English.
- 9.
If the speaker in (5) asked, “Have you seen the elderly man who always sits on the bench over there?”, use of the definite article is intuitively okay. This is predicted by Gundel et al. (1993), since a rich description makes it much more plausible that the addressee is able to establish a unique representation of the intended referent.
- 10.
(1) is an example of an item that allows for a possessive NP (‘my parrot’) in the target position.
- 11.
The term ‘iconic approach’ is only intended to reflect the iconicity of the NP form, not other aspects of the speech event. Yao and Scheepers (2011) observe that the speaking rate of a reported speech event affected the reading rate during eyetracking when reported with direct speech, but not with indirect speech. This suggests that in contrast to direct speech, indirect speech is not mentally simulated and is thus ‘iconic’ to a lesser extent than direct speech.
- 12.
Although the main rule is that a definite article should appear before the adjective in a Norwegian premodified definite noun phrase, the preposed article can be omitted if the adjective uniquely picks out the referent. This is the case, for instance, with many superlative adjectives.
- 13.
Yet another difference between Norwegian and the other languages is that the possessive pronoun appears after the definite noun in Norwegian, as opposed to English and German, which place the possessive in front of the (simple or complex) noun. This difference does not play any role in our study, though.
- 14.
The comparison of the use of ten with the use of the Russian demonstrative eto shows that they are not equivalents. In contexts where the Czech demonstrative ten is used for the expression of speakers’ emotionality, it can sometimes be translated with the Russian eto (Cze. T y děti, ty děti!—Rus. Ох уж е т и дети!—Eng. These children!). This, however, is not possible in intensifying contexts (Cze. Vem si jinou čepici, nebo ti ty uši omrznou—Rus. Другую шапку надэпь, а то ведь Ø уши отморозишь.—Eng. Take another hat or these ears of yours (‘your ears’) will freeze) (cf. Berger 1993, pp. 185–186). Significant differences between Czech and Russian are also evident in the use of ten in deictic and anaphoric contexts: Cze. Co potřebujete, abyste ten proces vyhrál? —Rus. Что вам нужно чтоды выиграть процесс?—Eng. What do you need in order to win the trial? (cf. Berger 1993, p. 187).
- 15.
Linguistic Context: F(1,24) = 19.53, p < .001, Referring Expression: F(2,48) = 70.19, p < .001.
- 16.
Scheffé tests: direct speech: definite vs. possessive: p < .001, bare vs. possessive: p < .001; indirect speech: definite vs. possessive: p < .04, bare vs. possessive: p < .001.
- 17.
Scheffé test: p < .03.
- 18.
Scheffé test: p < .04.
- 19.
Beware that the correlation to Sæbø’s postulate on specific indefinites is only indirect, since we have not tested directly what utterance the informants imagine to report on when choosing a certain nominal form in indirect speech. The comparison of the results in indirect and direct speech allows us to infer, though, what forms are assumed to be the most natural ones in the original speech event.
- 20.
The fact that there is no statistically significant increase in the use of proper names under the same condition is probably related to the fact that proper names (of human beings) are not used anaphorically as readily as definite descriptions (see e.g., Ariel 1990).
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Borthen, K., Hemforth, B., Mertins, B., Behrens, B., Fabricius-Hansen, C. (2014). Referring Expressions in Speech Reports. In: Hemforth, B., Mertins, B., Fabricius-Hansen, C. (eds) Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 44. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05675-3_5
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