Abstract
The quotational theory of free indirect discourse postulates that pronouns and tenses are systematically unquoted. But where does this unquotation come from? Based on cases of apparent unquotation in direct discourse constructions (including data from Kwaza speakers, Catalan signers, and Dutch children), I suggest a general pragmatic answer: unquotation is essentially a way to resolve a conflict that arises between two opposing constraints. On the one hand, the reporter wants to use indexicals that refer directly to the most salient speech act participants and their surroundings (Attraction). On the other hand, the semantics of direct discourse (formalized here in terms of event modification) entails the reproduction of referring expressions from the original utterance being reported (Verbatim). Unquotation (formalized here also in terms of event modification), allows the reporter to avoid potential conflicts between these constraints. Unquotation in free indirect discourse then comes out as a special case, where the salient source of attraction is the story protagonist and her actions, rather than the reporting narrator and his here and now.
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘free indirect discourse’ is misleading. Free indirect discourse is not really a species of indirect discourse (Banfield 1973; Maier 2015). In fact, as we will see, it is closer to direct discourse, both semantically and syntactically. According to Banfield, the term ‘free’ refers to the fact that the report clause is not syntactically subordinated.
- 2.
Helen de Hoop p.c. has collected similar examples from the early Dutch epistolary novel Sara Burgerhart by Aagje Deken and Betje Wolff, 1782.
- 3.
I also assume existential closure of event lambdas left over at sentence level (as usual in event semantics), and (the translational analogues of) rules like predicate modification and intensional function application (Heim and Kratzer 1998).
- 4.
In most cases, filling in the gaps is a straightforward exercise, but in others, some additional research is needed. I leave this for another occasion.
- 5.
For those skeptical of content as a theoretical primitive, note that an utterance event e occurring in a world w at time t quite naturally determines a unique Kaplanian context of utterance (context(e) := 〈agent(e), t, w〉), and also a Kaplanian character (char(e) := the character of the sentence uttered in e. Hence, the skeptic may understand content(e) as char(e)(context(e)) (for any utterance event e at a given time and world).
- 6.
The equality sign in (8) may be an oversimplification. Direct discourse rarely provides a literal copy of the original (cf. e.g., Wade and Clark 1993; Saka 2005). We could model this flexibility of direct discourse by substituting a context-dependent relation of sufficient similarity for the equality of forms here (cf. Bonami and Godard 2008; Maier 2014b). In addition, the current analysis does not account for the apparent transparency of direct speech with respect to anaphora and ellipsis. I refer the interested reader to Michael Johnson’s 2017 contribution to this volume for a criticism along these lines, and to my 2014b:14–15 for a sketch of a pragmatic solution.
- 7.
Cf. Ludwig and Ray (2017) for a similar use of a form-function on speech events.
- 8.
In principle, IPA would be a more appropriate alphabet for spoken utterances, and it might even be possible to come up with an alphabet of ‘signemes’ for signed utterances.
- 9.
More specifically: ⌜abcde⌝ is a well-formed expression of type u (cf. Potts 2007), and the five letter string itself is an entity in the corresponding domain D u .
- 10.
In fact, as Banfield (1973) suggests, free indirect speech reports purporting to represent X’s words are often better thought of as reporting what the addressee Y is hearing than as what X is saying. If so, perhaps all so-called free indirect speech reports are really free indirect thought reports.
- 11.
As Michael Johnson (p.c.) points out, smileys and emoticons may be considered the print counterparts of event demonstrations, as in She was like,.
- 12.
- 13.
This is a case where spelling out the exact recursive translation rules is non-trivial. For instance, we’ll likely need to assume some kind of syntactic movement to get the unquoted expressions outside the quote. Cf. Maier (2014b) and Koev (2016) for more detailed proposals incorporating such a movement, or Shan (2011) for an account without movement.
- 14.
Sharvit (2008) has argued that these unquoted pronominal features are actually interpreted de se i.e., the result of so-called ‘sequence of tense’ and ‘sequence of person’ rules in English, triggered by a silent attitude verb in the syntax. As I have shown elsewhere, this is entirely compatible with a quotation + unquotation approach, like this one, but I won’t spell out the details here (Maier 2015).
- 15.
This passage is also cited and discussed by Evans (2012).
- 16.
The data Evans mentions for Slave and Nez Perce are ultimately inconclusive, as there is some additional evidence that the reports in question are indirect rather than direct discourse (Anand and Nevins 2004; Deal 2014). For these languages, more research is required to compare the relative merits of a monstrous indirect discourse analysis (à la Schlenker 2003) and a direct discourse with unquotation analysis (as proposed here).
- 17.
Evans suggests that this example may be just a “performance error”. Nonetheless, if examples like this occur regularly, that could be taken as evidence for attraction as a pragmatic principle.
- 18.
In Kaplan’s (1989) Logic of Demonstratives, it is a logical truth that all indexicals refer directly. This theorem however depends on a semantic notion of direct reference. On Kaplan’s semantic construal, indexicals in direct discourse have no reference at all, while on the current pragmatic construal they may still be used to refer to individuals (Maier 2016).
- 19.
A report that avoids this violation would look like They told me, “Oh I’ve got the wrong house, you live next door”, with both I and you understood as unquoted. More empirical research, for instance a corpus study on colloquial, oral storytelling, would have to be done to determine if such reports indeed occur, or if Attraction in English is restricted to the addressee.
- 20.
Saka (p.c.) and Evans both raise the possibility of a natural, cross-linguistic hierarchy constraining this process of unquotation by Attraction, e.g. if a given language (or a given genre, modality, or construction) allows first person unquotation to satisfy Attraction it must also allow it for second person.
- 21.
On the other hand, Maier (2015) cites style guides for formal writing that suggest that a reporter should adjust pronouns and tenses to fit the reporting environment. This may be viewed as an instance of unquotation by attraction, quite similar in fact to what we’ll see in Sect. 4. The only difference then is that the unquotation must be marked overtly in such genres.
- 22.
It is often noticed in the sign language literature that a reporter may include gestures and other iconic elements (especially in so-called classifier constructions, cf. Davidson 2015) into their report, as demonstrations of certain paralinguistic or extralinguistic events surrounding the reported utterance. As outlined in Sect. 2.3 for spoken reports, I propose to model this as a demonstrational action report modifying the reported utterance event with the additional constraint demonstration(d, e) (with d referring to the reporter’s partly verbal demonstration).
- 23.
I’ve added some arguments against the monstrous approach to role shift myself (Maier 2016).
- 24.
This pilot study was performed by myself and Martine Zwets in Nijmegen, 2012. Unfortunately, the study never moved beyond the exploratory, informal data collection stage.
- 25.
Narratologists stress the fundamental differences between the narrator and the author, and between the narratee and the reader. In this paper I do not make these fine distinctions. I use the terms narrator and author (or speaker, or writer, for that matter) interchangeably.
- 26.
The logical form in (37b) is a simplification of my proposal in (Maier 2015). For instance, I argue there that in an example like this it’s not the whole pronoun and verb that get unquoted but only the third person and tense features.
- 27.
The time of narration is a rather abstract concept, distinct from both the time of writing and the time of reading, but, as pointed out above, such subtleties don’t concern us here. What’s important is that, in the case of a story, the time of narration is less salient (or backgrounded, not-at-issue, if you will) than the time of the story, whenever these two notions come apart.
- 28.
I thank Kathryn Davidson, Amy Rose Deal, Nicholas Evans, Petra Hendriks, Franziska Köder, Josep Quer, Per Erik Solberg, and Ede Zimmermann for helpful discussion about data and theory. Special thanks to Paul Saka and Michael Johnson detailed editorial reviews. For help gathering and interpreting the sign language data discussed in Sect. 3.2 I thank Martine Zwets, Mascha van den Barselaar, Johan Ros, Yassine Nauta, Merel Naomi van Zuilen, and the participants in our 2012 survey. This research is supported by the EU under FP7, ERC Starting Grant 263890-BLENDS.
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Maier, E. (2017). The Pragmatics of Attraction. In: Saka, P., Johnson, M. (eds) The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68747-6_9
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