Alessandro Capone

In this chapter I deal with indirect reports in terms of language games. I try to make connections between the theory of language games and the theory of indirect reports, in the light of the issue of clues and cues. Indirect reports are based on an interplay of voices. The voice of the reporter must allow hearers to ‘reconstruct’ the voice of the reported speaker. Ideally, it must be possible to separate the reporter’s voice from that of the reported speaker. When we analyze the language game of indirect reporting, we ideally want to establish which parts belong to the primary voice and which parts belong to the reporter’s voice. In this paper I apply considerations on language games by Dascal et al. and I explore the dialectics between abstract pragmatics principles and considerations about situated uses that are sensitive to cues and clues.

In this paper, I deal with implicit indirect reports. First of all, I discuss implicit indirect reports involving the first person. Then, I prove that in some cases second person reports are implicit indirect reports involving a de se attribution. Next, I draw analogies with implicit indirect reports involving the third person. I establish some similarities at the level of free enrichment through which the explicature is obtained and I propose that the explicature is syntactically active, given that it sanctions anaphora.

In this chapter, I am going to discuss a very interesting case brought to our attention by Saul and references therein: NP-related substitution failure in simple sentences. Whereas it is well known that opacity occurs in intensional contexts and that in such contexts it is not licit to replace an NP with a co-referential one, one would not expect that substitution failure should also be exhibited by simple sentences in the context of stories about Superman. The suggested explanation of these cases is to posit an embedding explicature, that is to say the insertion of structure that ipso facto creates an intensional context capable of blocking substitution. I consider various complications to this story in the light of important objections by García-Carpintero and, finally, I consider how this story fares when one applies constraints on explicatures along the lines of those proposed by Hall in an interesting paper.In general, this chapter exploits interesting considerations by Norrick on the structural similarities between stories and indirect reports. Norrick believes there are important differences, but he is inclined to concede that we could study structural similarities. An important similarity, brought out by the examples discussed by Saul, is that the narrative frame, once it is inserted into the interaction, can be left implicit and, during the act of narrating or referring to the story, one need not repeat the words ‘the story says’ or ‘we are told that…’ every time. Although implicit, these words are heard because they do some work at the structural level, as is shown by this attempt to resolve an otherwise intractable philosophical problem. The explicatures of simple sentences are perceived because they are integrated into the speakers’/hearers’ perception of the overall plan of discourse, as Haugh most interestingly notes:As Haugh and Jaszczolt note, this means that any putative “communicative intention of A is embedded within his higher-order intention”. In other words, to figure out the implicature that evidently arises here, the participants are necessarily making inferences about some kind of overall aim. According to this view, then, inferences about the intended implicature arise concomitant with inferences about the overall aim of the speaker.It follows from the considerations by Haugh that, since the explicature connected with simple sentences depends on the perception of the overall aim or plan of the conversation, it is not easily cancelled. Readers can check by themselves that the explicatures due to simple sentences cannot be cancelled, as cancelling them would involve returning to illogical discourses.. Haugh’s considerations about the overall aim of the discourse are precious in explaining how the embedding explicatures I posit are calculated once and for all for the whole stretch of the discourse framed by the narrative act.

In this paper, I try to expatiate on the poetic function of language on the basis of considerations by Jakobson and Waugh. I try to bring in the consideration that pragmatics plays an important role in elucidating the poetic function of language. Contextualism allows us to interpret a poem: referents must be fixed or need not be fixed due to the requirements of the discourse; citations are brought in through pragmatic ways; polyphony is achieved by taking into account the context of previous analyses of a poetic text; the vicinity of a certain word, or concept or line is likely to affect the interpretation of a certain expression; the poetic text can take different forms, from graffiti to discourse at the market place, to discourse between lovers. All these forms of poetic text would not exist if the notion of poetry did not include the idea of semantic/pragmatic compression which is matched, in interpretation, by expansions.

In this paper, I distinguish between linguistic and non-linguistic presuppositions. I also propose that we should be interested in conversational presuppositions, which could also be called speaker-meant presuppositions or speaker's presuppositions. I also distinguish between potential and actual presuppositions. I propose that, in some cases, presuppositions can be conversationally implicated and cancellation is possible. I specify what the hard cases are and I try to explain them through ontological considerations. I try to reduce the hard cases through (a) the notion that all actual presuppositions are speaker-meant; (b) the distinction between ontological and linguistic presuppositions; and (c) the uncontroversial notion that even ontological presuppositions are susceptible to semantic under-determination that has to be tackled though pragmatic intrusion. Pragmatic intrusion for presuppositional cases, however, cannot really amount to completing or expanding or in any case computing an explicature in an ordinary sense, as explicatures have to do with truth-conditions and aim to create propositionally complete forms that are truth-evaluable, unlike propositional fragments or schemata that are usually expressed in sentences (;, 2012). They are processes similar to explicatures, but since presuppositions are only pre-conditions for an utterance's being true or false (; Macagno; 2016; ; ), we cannot say that these processes are completely like those of explicatures. Nevertheless, they are pragmatically-motivated, even if hard to cancel. (See on lack of cancellability or on entrenched meanings.) This more or less brings my approach in line with contextualism (even if I accept semantic invariantism, along the lines of or (Invariantism is also shared by, in a form that is compatible with her contextualism.)).

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 a minimal semantic logical form 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.

In this paper, I deal with implicit indirect reports. First of all, I discuss implicit indirect reports involving the first person. Then, I prove that in some cases second person reports are implicit indirect reports involving a de se attribution. Next, I draw analogies with implicit indirect reports involving the third person. I establish some similarities at the level of free enrichment through which the explicature is obtained and I propose that the explicature is syntactically active, given that it sanctions anaphora.