Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the ways indirect reports are formulated by bilingual speakers whose L1 is English (9 subjects) and whose L1 is not English (12 subjects) based on a small corpus consisting of the language productions of 21 speakers. Subjects were asked to report the utterances of other people that represented three categories: statement, question and request. The analysis attempts to answer the following questions: (1) How much of the semantic core is preserved in the report?, (2) In what ways do reporters try to express the pragmatic content they assume the original utterance has?, (3) What factors may affect the ability and preference of non-native speakers to do things differently from native speakers?
It is argued and demonstrated that emergent situational salience plays a decisive role in what speakers actually report from the original message, and how they shape the reported message. The analysis shows that there is a difference in how the two groups of subjects treated indirect reporting. While the indirect reports produced by bilingual subjects whose L1 is English are a reflections of a pragmatics-based top-down approach to the original utterance, the indirect reports made by bilingual subjects whose L1 is other than English reflect more like a semantics-based bottom-up approach to the original utterance which is enriched pragmatically by the reporter either based on what the message conveys or in the reporter’s own way.
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Notes
- 1.
Reporters in the dataset are referred to by capital letters and numbers. Capital letters denote first language of the reporter. If there is more than one speaker of the same L1 numbers are used to refer to them. E stands for English, CA refers to Cantonese, CH to Mandarin Chinese, K means Korean, J stands for Japanese, R means Russian and KU refers to Kurdish.
- 2.
“Cooperation” is used here in the Gricean sense according to which cooperation is part of human rationality.
- 3.
“Egocentrism” in the SCA refers to attention-bias that is the result of prior experience of individuals. It means that interlocutors activate and bring up the most salient information to the needed attentional level in the construction (by the speaker) and comprehension (by the hearer) of the communication. In this sense there is nothing negative about egocentrism (Kecskes 2010, 2013).
- 4.
The first number always refers to native speaker subject while the second one refers to non-native speakers.
- 5.
Illocutionary point and illocutionary force are understood here as in Searle and Vanderveken (1985).
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Kecskes, I. (2016). Indirect Reporting in Bilingual Language Production. In: Capone, A., Kiefer, F., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Indirect Reports and Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21395-8_2
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