Indirect Reports and Pragmatics by Alessandro Capone

Indirect Reports and Pragmatics by Alessandro Capone

This volume offers the reader a singular overview of current thinking on indirect reports. The contributors are eminent researchers from the fields of philosophy of language, theoretical linguistics and communication theory, who answer questions on this important issue. This exciting area of controversy has until now mostly been treated from the viewpoint of philosophy. This volume adds the views from semantics, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics.

Authors address matters such as the issue of semantic minimalism vs. radical contextualism, the attribution of responsibility for the modes of presentation associated with Noun Phrases and how to distinguish the indirect reporter’s responsibility from the original speaker’s responsibility. They also explore the connection between indirect reporting and direct quoting. Clearly indirect reporting has some bearing on the semantics/pragmatics debate, however, there is much controversy on “what is said”, whether this is aminimal semantic logical form (enriched by saturating pronominals) or a much richer and fully contextualized logical form. This issue will be discussed from several angles. Many of the authors are contextualists and the discussion brings out the need to take context into account when one deals with indirect reports, both the context of the original utterance and the context of the report. It is interesting to see how rich cues and clues can radically transform the reported message, assigning illocutionary force and how they can be mobilized to distinguish several voices in the utterance. Decoupling the voice of the reporting speaker from that of the reported speaker on the basis of rich contextual clues is an important issue that pragmatic theory has to tackle. Articles on the issue of slurs will bring new light to the issue of decoupling responsibility in indirect reporting, while others are theoretically oriented and deal with deep problems in philosophy and epistemology.

Ferenc Kiefer, Ph.D. (1965, University of Szeged), is research professor at the Hungarian Acadamy of Sciences, Budapest. He has published monographs and many articles on mathematical linguistiscs, morphology, semantics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.

Piet van Sterkenburg, Ph.D. (1975, University of Nijmegen), is research professor of lexicology at the University of Leiden. He has published monographs and many articles on Dutch linguistics, lexicography and lexicology, including Een geschiedenis van woordenboieken van het Nederlands [History of Dutch Monolingual Dictionaries], (Scriptum. Schiedam, 2011) and Practical Guide to Lexicography (Benjamins, 2003).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9783319793405
ISBN 10	3319793403
Title	Indirect Reports and Pragmatics
Author	Alessandro Capone
Series	Perspectives In Pragmatics Philosophy And Psychology Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Springer International Publishing AG
Year published	2019-03-27
Number of pages	648
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.