Abstract
Languages offer various ways to report what someone said. There is now a vast but heterogeneous literature on speech report constructions scattered throughout the semantics literature. We offer a bird’s eye view of the entire landscape of reporting and propose a classification along two dimensions: at-issue vs. not-at-issue, and eventive vs. non-eventive. This bird’s eye perspective leads to genuinely new insights, for instance on the nature of quotative evidentials and reportative moods, viz., that they are both eventive, and hence semantically more like some types of direct and indirect speech than reportative evidentials and modals are. EARLY ACCESS
Highlights
We often refer to what other people have said
Of eventivity, not-at-issue content is often considered immune to modification as in (9), so if we find that something can’t be modified, this can be blamed on either not-at-issueness or non-eventivity
When we look at the larger context in which the example occurs, it becomes clear that we’re really dealing with a description of a speech event, including reference to a specific source, time and conversation: (76) Today, for example, when I spoke to this one [in the audience], I asked him about these six things, whether he was going to engage in them; and when I
Summary
We often refer to what other people have said. And we do so for a variety of different reasons, and using a variety of different linguistic structures. Our primary aim in this paper is not to introduce a completely new semantic analysis of, say, Gitksan evidential marking, nor to provide new data on, say, Dutch parenthetical indirect discourse, nor to formulate a new linguistic test for not-atissueness — we do bring up new data here and there, and we do offer some novel modifications and syntheses of semantic theories and tests — but to survey the entire landscape of speech reporting, bringing together previously isolated areas of interest in semantics, investigating what they share, and how exactly they differ This bird’s eye perspective does lead to genuinely new insights, for instance on the nature of reportative moods, which share not-at-issueness with evidentials, but are crucially different from genuine reportative evidentials in being eventive, like direct and indirect discourse.
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