The Functions Of Reported Speech In Discourse

The Functions of Reported Speech in Discourse

Reported Speech

In sentences containing reported speech, thought, or perception, it is possible to distinguish different voices or views, associated with different discourse roles. They originate in two different clauses: one clause signals a reporting situation, and the other a reported situation. This volume examines the methods used for combining these two types of clauses in a range of languages. In each of the contributions, the focus is on the forms and functions of verbs; topics dealt with include the meaning of tense, mood, and aspect (and their interaction) in the various types of reported speech, the speech act status of reported utterances, correlations between reporting verbs and verbs in reported clauses (and the conjunctions introducing them), and possible intra-systemic and cross-linguistic correlations of these properties. The articles concentrate on the Slavic languages Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene, the Romance languages Latin, Old and Modern French, and Spanish, the Germanic languages Swedish, German, Dutch, and English, the Indo-Iranian language Bengali, and Mandarin Chinese.

Reported Discourse

The present volume unites 15 papers on reported discourse from a wide genetic and geographical variety of languages. Besides the treatment of traditional problems of reported discourse like the classification of its intermediate categories, the book reflects in particular how its grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic properties have repercussions in other linguistic domains like tense-aspect-modality, evidentiality, reference tracking and pronominal categories, and the grammaticalization history of quotative constructions. Almost all papers present a major shift away from analyzing reported discourse with the help of abstract transformational principles toward embedding it in functional and pragmatic aspects of language. Another central methodological approach pervading this collection consists in the discourse-oriented examination of reported discourse based on large corpora of spoken or written texts which is increasingly replacing analyses of constructed de-contextualized utterances prevalent in many earlier treatments. The book closes with a comprehensive bibliography on reported discourse of about 1.000 entries.