Donnerstag, 10.30-11.00
This paper has two principal themes. Firstly I attempt to characterise different types of reported speech in terms of "pragmatic responsibility". In most utterances, the speaker takes on the pragmatic responsibility for the content of the utterance and its relationship to the real world. In reported speech, speakers assign some or all of this responsibility to another source. Different types of reported speech can be placed on a continuum depending on where the pragmatic responsibility is located: not only the traditional categories of direct and indirect speech, but other types identified by Short et al. (1995) and Thompson (1996). The proposed analysis dispenses completely with the notion of an "original utterance". The notion of "Distanzierung", sometimes used to explain the use of the subjunctive in reported speech in German, can be reconstructed in terms of "degree of pragmatic responsibility". The second aim of the paper is to show that pragmatics can take on most of the burden of accounting for time reference in indirect reported speech in English. Few researchers now believe in a mechanical sequence of tense rule as proposed by Comrie (1986), but the strongest alternative - the dual past tense analysis proposed by Declerck (1990) - is also problematic. I argue that a pragmatic solution is preferable to both these analyses, with the result that a simple system for the semantics of tense can be preserved.
e-mail: r.m.salkie@bton.ac.uk
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