Grazia Basile

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque.

Synonymy is a very common phenomenon in our daily speech and can be defined, in most cases, not as identity but as similarity of meaning. Speakers of historical-natural languages are perfectly able to recognize the commonality of meaning shared by two words, and their ability to replace words of similar meaning in the same proposition is not based exclusively on linguistic factors. Substitutability is also based on non-linguistic factors such as the speakers’ differences and individual fluctuations related to their experiences and on context of reference.In this paper, we will use synonymy as an experimentum crucis to demonstrate that knowledge of the conventional meaning of expressions alone is not sufficient to determine the proposition expressed. The traditional distinction between semantics and pragmatics is re-examined and the fundamental role that context plays in synonymy is highlighted. We discuss how looking at semantic content through a more pragmatic lens can serve to broaden existing concepts of meaning and conditions of truth and shed new light on the way in which linguistic expressions are understood and used by speakers.

Polysemy is a pervasive phenomenon in historical-natural languages and thus central to any description of their functioning. An ideal language would have a unique and univocal designation for every event, fact, class or cultural category, but historical-natural languages simply cannot have a one-to-one correspondence between signs and referents because of the principle of economy and its key role in languages, and also because human experiences are extremely rich and complex. As a result, words are characterised by polysemy. In this paper we will deal with polysemy, how it is interwoven with categorization and memory and how the disambiguation of the possible senses of a polysemic word necessarily depends on the context. The aim of this paper is to show that polysemy is not merely a linguistic issue but a phenomenon of great theoretical interest from a “global” point of view that holds together semantic and pragmatic aspects. Polysemy not only allows us to make progress in consideration of how human cognition and memory function, but also – considering the major role played by the context – it is a central theme when exploring the interface between semantics and pragmatics.

This work aims to develop some considerations on an extremely interesting topic for linguistic investigation, namely indirect speech during dialogue. In particular, we will consider ten dialogues between a therapist and schizophrenic patients, starting from a corpus of pathological speech. The focus of our investigation is on the cases of indirect speech produced both by the patient and by the therapist during the therapeutic session. In the cases of indirect speech we can observe a position on the part of the speaker in which what matters is not so much what is reported but the way, from a metalinguistic point of view, in which this is formulated. In indirect speech the message passes through the filter of the speakers so that they feel relatively free from duties of fidelity and can express, from an illocutionary point of view, their personal attitude through the mediation made possible by language devices.As regards schizophrenic language, in our opinion the cases of indirect speech constitute a particularly interesting observatory in which both the patient and the therapist characterize themselves as linguistic and metalinguistic subjects, able to report contents and, at the same time, their attitude toward them.

In this paper, I examine the important impact of Paul Broca on our understanding of language. Broca not only discovered the brain area responsible for language production, but he also highlighted the importance of a general language faculty – as Ferdinand de Saussure would later do in his Course in General Linguistics – considered as a kind of semiotic faculty that enables us to establish a constant relationship between an idea and a sign, between an entity that is situated on the level of content and an entity that is situated on the level of expression. Saussure later emphasized that this faculty of associating something on the level of content with something on the level of expression is a natural tendency in every human being. In this paper we will argue – with reference to the socio-constructivist theory of meaning – that the “generality” to which Broca refers should be understood to be closely correlated with the “naturalness” intended by Saussure. In particular, general and natural should be considered together, taking into account the ways in which human beings who live within a linguistic community put into practice, from childhood, their ability to build a language and, conversely, what happens when, in cases of aphasia, patients - so to speak - “lose the words”. Both children who are acquiring their mother tongue and aphasic patients who fail to “find the words” behave in a holistic way, within forms of life, that is, shared situations in which their own life experiences, hab-its, knowledge, words and so on come to life.