Reported Speech and Represented Speech

Abstract

All languages haveindexicalwords and/or grammatical categories (e.g. “I,” “you,” “this,” “that,” the past tense marker ‐ed) for grounding speech in the situation where it is being used. All languages also have ways of representing another speech situation within the immediate one through the use ofreported speech. Its most basic form, which is found in all languages, isdirect discourse, in which the indexical grounding of the reported utterance is imported into the reporting one (e.g. “He said ‘I'll go’”). Many languages also have forms ofindirect discourse, in which the indexical grounding is shifted to that of the reporting speech situation (e.g. “He said he would go”). Often the shift is only partial, resulting in intermediate varieties between direct and indirect. There is alsofree indirect discourse, in which the speaker represents the speech of another without any explicit indication of that fact. Free indirect discourse shades off into the more general phenomenon of “voice,” which has been much explored by linguistic anthropologists under the influence of Michael Bakhtin. Here I present examples of all these phenomena in various languages of the world and relate them to other aspects of culture and social life.