On the social praxis of indirect reporting

Abstract

Indirect reports are segments of speech involving a dialogic dimension (clearly constituting a case of polyphony) and thus studying them offers a chance to linguistics to appropriate again its original status as a theory that deals with linguistic signs and communication. The practice of indirect reporting intersects with a theory of knowledge, as, through the indirect report, knowledge is imparted on the basis of which the Hearer will decide whether to act or not and how s/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 (instead, I think that opacity in direct quotation is mainly a semantic issue). I try to explain opacity pragmatically, although I accept that there are numerous exceptions one has to account for (namely replacements of NPs with the aim of facilitating the establishment of reference). In this paper, I also consider the issue of slurs, in terms of opacity of the pragmatic kind 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).