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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 32:3 (2022) ► pp.381–402

Metapragmatics in indirect reports

The degree of reflexivity

ORCID logo | Shahrood University of Technology
| Shahrood University of Technology

This study attempts to describe how metapragmatic devices can exert change in indirect reporting. This was achieved through the analysis of naturally occurring indirect reports during interaction. Specifically, indirect reports were extracted from a series of expert talks (≈800 minutes) broadcast by Iranian national TV. The analysis of these expert talks showed cases of communicative ‘know-hows’, where Persian speakers reflectively managed the dialogue in terms of their interpretation of the original utterance. Accordingly, Persian speakers negotiated the degree of reflexivity by changing the verb of saying and by adhering to specific syntactic markers. Thus, contrary to previous research, the present study revealed that Persian indirect reports can benefit from some syntactic markers to show that speakers do not perfectly adhere to the pragmatic force of the original speaker’s utterance. By contrast, Persian speakers use classes of markers, or contextualisation clues (Gumperz 1982), to show their control over the utterances. These markers are generally used to indicate politeness, uncertainty, and summarisation in Persian indirect reports. Such markers can distinguish indirect reports in Persian from those of other languages such as English.

Keywords: contextual clues, indirect reports, metapragmatics, reflexivity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Persian indirect reports
  • 4.Method
  • 5.The metalinguistic function of reported speech
    • 5.1Fully reflexive indirect reports
    • 5.2Degenerately reflexive indirect reports
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 24 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.21004.mor
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