Sociocognitive vs. Structural Issues

Abstract

This chapter revolves around three topics: social, cognitive, and structural issues of indirect reporting. Regarding the social issues, this chapter discusses Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology and Grice’s Cooperative Principle. As related to cognitive aspects, Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory and its relation to indirect reports are discussed, where it is argued that indirect reports are cases of ostensive behaviour because, by reporting others, the reporting speaker has an intention in mind that needs to be communicated as clearly as possible. Moreover, it is argued that indirect reports are strongly influenced by individuals’ appraisals. Both the hearer and the reporting speaker participate in indirect reports based on their appraisals of the event (indirect reporting forms a bridge between the molecular and molar way of viewing emotion). Likewise, some structural features of indirect reporting are elaborated in this chapter (issues such as ‘complementiser that’, verbs of propositional attitude, modes of representation, etc.). This chapter concludes that it is unfair to approach the indirect report merely as a speech act being directed only by restricted syntactic and semantic rules. Indirect reports are complex language games, to refer to the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein.