Reported Discourse

“The study of reported speech has a venerable history in linguistic and related disciplines: exercises in oratio obliqua were part of the training of every student of Latin and Greek from Antiquity, philosophers have long puzzled over the de re / de dicto distinction, and literary scholars have pondered over such apparent self-contradictions as style indirect libre. But it is probably true to say that reported speech in general has not played a major role in recent linguistic theory. This collective monograph promises to correct this situation. Its contributions address critical descriptive and theoretical issues in a wide range of languages, both geographically (from western Europe and the Caucasus to the South Pacific) and chronologically (from Ancient Egyptian to the present day). The phenomenon of reported speech is located firmly in its functional and pragmatic context, without losing sight of the importance of its formal characteristics in different languages. The contributions are important not only for the insight they provide into indirect discourse as such, but for their relevance to such crucial areas in contemporary linguistic theory as deixis (both pronominal and temporal), reference-tracking (including logophoric reference, a concept that has only within the last couple of decades made its way into general linguistic theory), and grammaticalization (in particular of quotative constructions). The richness of the empirical material and the insightfulness of the theoretical discussion will appeal to linguists with interests ranging from syntax to pragmatics, from descriptive to historical linguistics, from typology to discourse structure.

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“I believe that this book will become a central reference for any descriptive or typological work on reported speech and related issues, showing as it does the range of morphosyntactic phenomena of which we must take account in any theory of reported speech.”