Direct and Indirect Speech 9783110871968, 9783110105995

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Direct and Indirect Speech

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 31

Editor

Werner Winter

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York · Amsterdam

Direct and Indirect Speech

edited by

Florian Coulmas

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York · Amsterdam

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

Direct and indirect speech. (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs ; 31) 1. Grammar, Comparative and general - Indirect discourse - Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Coulmas, Florian. II. Series. P301.5.I53D57 1986 415 85-29795 ISBN 0-89925-176-5

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Direct and indirect speech / ed. by Florian Coulmas. - Berlin ; New York ; Amsterdam : Mouton, de Gruyter, 1986. (Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 31) ISBN 3-11-010599-3 NE: Coulmas, Florian [Hrsg.]; Trends in linguistics / Studies and monographs

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© Copyright 1986 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form - by photoprint, microfilm or any other means - nor transmitted nor translated into a machine language without written permission from Mouton de Gruyter, a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. Typesetting: Wagner GmbH, Nördlingen. - Printing: Ratzlow-Druck, Berlin. Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer GmbH, Berlin. - Printed in Germany.

Preface The objective of this book is to clarify the notions of direct and indirect speech. Its raison d'etre as a collection of articles is the fact that general notions of this kind are best understood when investigated with respect to several different languages. Only carefull comparative analysis can show how general they really are. The authors of this book all agree with me that reported speech is a subject well worth the effort of a cross-linguistic co-operative approach. It is thanks to them that this volume presents accounts of direct and indirect speech in 14 different languages of almost as many language families with occassional references to many others. I have learned a lot from their contributions. Should this turn out to be true for other readers too, then the book will have achived its purpose. While working on this volume, I was a Heisenberg-Fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which I gratefully acknowledge. F. Coulmas

Tokyo, December 1984

Contents Preface Contributors Reported speech: Some general issues Florian Coulmas Direct and indirect speech: A functional study Charles N. Li Some remarks on direct and indirect speech in Slave (Northern Athapaskan) Keren D. Rice

V IX 1

29

47

Reported speech in Yoruba Ay ο Bamgbose

77

Reported speech in Swahili David P. B. Massamba

99

Speech reporting in the Caucasus B. G. Hewitt and S. R. Crisp

121

Reported speech in some languages of Nepal Karen Ebert

145

Direct and indirect speech in Japanese Florian Coulmas

161

The particle -o and content-oriented indirect speech in Japanese written discourse Senko K. Maynard

179

Some semantic aspects of indirect speech in Hungarian Ferenc Kiefer

201

Reported speech in Danish Hartmut Haberland

219

VIII

Contents

Reported speech in French and Hungarian Ivan Fonagy

255

Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and American conversational and Literary Narrative Deborah Tannen

311

Characteristics of direct and reported speech prosody: Evidence from Spanish Karen H. Kvavik

333

Index of subjects

361

Index of names

366

Contributors Ayo Bamgbose Florian Coulmas S. R. Crisp Karen Ebert Ivan Fonagy Hartmut Haberland Brian G. Hewitt Ferenc Kiefer Karen H. Kvavik Charles N. Li Senko K. Maynard David P. B. Massamba Keren D. Rice Deborah Tannen

Ibadan, Nigeria Düsseldorf, FRG Hull, England Marburg, FRG Antony, France Roskilde, Danmark Hull, England Budapest, Hungary Minneapolis, U.S.A Santa Barbara, U.S. A New Brunswick, U.S. A Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania Toronto, Canada Washington, D.C., U.S.A

Reported speech: Some general issues Florian Coulmas

Summary Reported speech has attracted the attention of scholars in several different fields, such as, Linguistics, Poetics, Logic, and the Philosophy of Language. In this paper I will review some of the literature most relevant to a linguistic theory of speech reporting. In passing, I will also refer to approaches quite outside Linguistics in a narrow sense, because reported speech is one of those phenomena whose proper treatment necessarily transcends departmental boundaries. First, some of the fundamental differences between direct and indirect speech are discussed with a special emphasis on a kind of sentence meaning ambiguity only to be found in indirect speech. It arises because in indirect speech the speaker is free to blend information about an utterance with information about the world not conveyed by that utterance. This ambiguity is thus known as the de dicto and de re ambiguity. Next, a third kind of reported speech is introduced which has intrigued many authors as it shares essential features with both direct and indirect speech. Then I go on to discuss the question of 'what counts as the same,' which is of central concern here because the purpose of speech reporting is to convey what another speaker said, either in one's own words or by reporting the same words that were used by that speaker. Prima facie this distinction seems to be clear-cut. However, the notion of verbatim rendition, that is, identity of form, seems to be culturally variable. While differences between forms of speech reporting may, therefore, be culturally determined to some extent, it is obvious that the grammatical devices for integrating the speech of another into one's own differ from one language to another. The remainder of the paper thus deals with the question of how the function of speech reporting is grammatically coded.

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1. Kinds of reported speech Utterances can be made the subject of other utterances. They can be criticized, questioned, commented on, or simply be reported. Language can be used to refer to language. We can talk about talk. This is true for all natural languages and is, indeed, a fundamental feature whose absence disqualifies any sign system as a human language. However, there are different ways of reporting the speech of another. Traditionally, two kinds of reported speech have been distinguished: oratio recta (direct quotation) and oratio obliqua (indirect quotation). The former evokes the original speech situation and conveys, or claims to convey, the exact words of the original speaker in direct discourse, while the latter adapts the reported utterance to the speech situation of the report in indirect discourse. The fundamental difference between the two lies in the speaker perspective or point of view of the reporter:1 In direct speech the reporter lends his voice to the original speaker and says (or writes) what he said, thus adopting his point of view, as it were. Direct speech, in a manner of speaking, is not the reporter's speech, but remains the reported speaker's speech whose role is played by the reporter. (1)

"Have you pray'd to-night, Desdemona?" asked Othello, and Desdemona answered: "Aye, my lord."

The speaker of (1) phrases his report like a dialogue. Even though Desdemona is not present in the report situation, Othello's utterance is phrased as if she were, and, conversely, Desdemona's utterance presupposes the presence of Othello. The reporter thus steps back behind the characters whose words he purports to report. In indirect speech, on the other hand, the reporter comes to the fore. He relates a speech event as he would relate any other event: from his own point of view. (2)

Othello asked his wife whether she had said her nightly prayers, which she affirmed.

(2) differs from (1) on several counts. First of all, there is no direct address in (2) as direct address requires the presence of the addressee. The second person address pronoun and the vocative, "Desdemona," in Othello's utterance in (1) are replaced by a third person pronoun, "she," and a descriptive term, "his wife," both reflecting the reporter's point of view. The tense of Othello's utterance is also changed: present perfect in

Reported speech

3

(1) becomes ante-preterit in (2), a point to which we will return below. Finally, Desdemona's utterance in (1) is reduced to a relative clause in (2), where "which" refers to the content of the indirect question in the preceding clause, "whether she had said her nightly prayers". Alternatively, her utterance could be rendered, somewhat redundantly, by making the contents of her affirmation explicit: "She affirmed that she had said her nightly prayer". Notice that Desdemona's utterance has no propositional content of its own. Its function is purely communicative, and this communicative function, the affirmation of the proposition of Othello's question, cannot be expressed but only described in indirect discourse. The expressive term, "aye," is thus replaced by a descriptive term, "affirm," which gives a category label to her speech act. Another apparent difference between (1) and (2) is the descriptive term referring to Desdemona in (2). Othello, of course, knows that Desdemona is his wife - this relationship is, after all, at the bottom of all his troubles - but he doesn't say so. "His wife" is a term that is provided by the reporter, who knows more about Othello and Desdemona than can be inferred from (1). In indirect speech, the reporter is free to introduce information about the reported speech event from his point of view and on the basis of his knowledge about the world, as he does not purport to give the actual words that were uttered by the original speaker(s) or that his report is restricted to what was actually said. Indirect speech is the speech of the reporter, its pivot is in the speech situation of the report. 1.1. De dicto and de re The possibility for the reporter to introduce additional information from his own point of view in reporting what someone else said creates potential ambiguities in indirect discourse, because it is not always unequivocally clear whether a descriptive term testifies to the appraisal of the original speaker or that of the reporter. This ambiguity is known as the de dicto vs. de re interpretation of descriptive terms in opaque contexts (cf. Partee 1973: 414f.). A classical example is that of Oedipus and Jocasta. (3) Oedipus said that his mother was beautiful.2 (3) has two readings, one in which the assertion is that Oedipus said that an individual that he identified as his mother was beautiful, and another where that individual is so identified only by the reporter but not

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by Oedipus. According to the former, the de dicto reading, the original utterance by Oedipus must have been something like 3 (4) My mother is beautiful. In the latter, the de re reading, Oedipus could have made any of the following and several other utterances. (5a) Jocasta is beautiful. b) My wife is beautiful. c) The mother of my children is beautiful. If any of (5) rather than (4) was the original utterance (which must have been the case, because Oedipus blinded himself in desperation upon learning that the woman he found beautiful was his mother) then only the de re reading of (3) would be true. The general problem is that in opaque contexts codesignative terms (Quine 1960: 151) cannot be exchanged salva veritate, that is, without changing the truth or falsity of what is said. Thus the de dicto reading of (3) would be false even if both (6) and (7) were true. (6) Jocasta is Oedipus' mother. (7)

Oedipus said, "Iokaste is beautiful."

Similar problems arise when attitudinal or value loaded expressions occur in the dependent clause of indirect speech. (8) John says that this lunatic doesn't know what he is saying. The italicized expression in (8) may be part of the report or an addition by the reporter. In some cases one reading is preferred over the other, as in (9), (9) John asked me to dance with his hysterical wife. where "hysterical" is likely to be the speaker's value judgement rather than John's. Generally, however, it cannot be determined whether identifications in indirect discourse belong to the original utterance or to the report. This kind of ambiguity cannot occur in direct discourse, because no interference of reporter's speech and quoted speech is possible. Direct speech always has a de dicto interpretation. The peculiarity of indirect discourse is that the reported utterance is processed by the reporter. It presupposes his analysis. "Analysis is," as Voloshinov (1973: 129) said, "the heart and soul of indirect discourse." The reporter's analysis can be de dicto or de re. In the former case it

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5

consists in adjusting the original utterance to the deictic center of the report situation without changing any other part of its linguistic form. De re analysis, on the other hand, allows the reporter to alter the form of the original utterance in accordance with what it means on the basis of this knowledge of the world in such a way that it may include inferences of which the original speaker is unaware. Grammatically, de dicto and de re indirect discourse are not distinct in spite of the profound difference in meaning. An utterance of the form (10)

X said that

complement clause

in its de dicto reading implies the claim that the complement clause is faithful to the form of X's original utterance except for the necessary deictic adjustments. In its de re reading it implies a quite different claim on the part of the speaker which might be paraphrased as follows. (11)

X said something which in conjunction with what I, the speaker, know about the world, and about the subject of X's utterance in particular, justifies the statement that complement clause

What appears to be simply the alternative to direct discourse is thus a complex assembly of ways of reporting another's speech or certain aspects thereof, all labeled "indirect discourse." They differ with respect to the faithfulness to the form of the original utterance and with respect to the processing of its content by the reporter. The combination of these two dimensions of variation make indirect speech a versatile mode of speech reporting ranging from faithfully adapting the linguistic form of the reported utterance to the deictic center of the report situation to a summarizing paraphrase of an utterance irrespective of its linguistic form. Complement sentences in indirect speech can be qualified by comments referring to the form of the reported utterance. (12)

Humpty Dumpty said that it was a most provoking thing when a person didn't know a cravat from a belt, and those were his exact words.

Humpty Dumpty's remark about the "most provoking thing" was addressed to his interlocutor, Alice, who made the blunder of mistaking his cravat for a belt. Thus, he couldn't very well have used the past tense in making his accusation. Nevertheless, the comment "those were his exact words" doesn't strike us as strange or illogical (cf. Banfield 1973: 9). What "those were his exact words" in an indirect speech context is

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apparently taken to mean is "his exact words, allowing for the changes necessitated by grammatical rules and/or the obvious shift of deictic center." In reporting another's speech the speaker can indicate in various ways that he intends his report to be faithful to the form of the reported utterance, in spite of its being phrased in indirect speech. On the other hand, indirect speech can be introduced by phrases qualifying it as a report of only the content of what another speaker said. (13)

The message of his book is that computerization is no salvation.

(14)

The president made a statement to the effect that the present government did not favor military intervention.

The italicized passages in (13) and (14) indicate that the speaker reports content, not form. While direct speech purports to give a verbatim rendition of the words that were spoken, indirect speech is more variable in claiming to represent a faithful report of the content or content and form of the words that were spoken. It is important to note, however, that the question of whether and how faithful a given speech report actually is, is of a quite different order. Both direct and indirect speech are stylistic devices for conveying messages. The former is used as if the words being used were those of another, which are therefore pivoted to a deictic center different from the speech situation of the report. Indirect speech, in contrast, has its deictic center in the report situation and is variable with respect to the extent that faithfulness to the linguistic form of what was said is being claimed.

1.2. A third kind The previous section has demonstrated that a simple dichotomy of direct versus indirect cannot do justice to the complexities of reported speech. In literary narratives a third kind of speech (and thought) reporting is very common which makes its conceptual penetration even more complex. Several nomenclatures have been proposed, behind which lie conflicting theoretical notions of what its essence is. As early as 1894, Tobler mentioned a third kind of speech reporting which he defined as "a peculiar mingling of direct and indirect discourse".4 The ensuing discussion concentrated on the French language, as French prose (La Fontaine, Zola, Merimee) seemed to offer the most examples of this stylistic device, which exhibits features of both direct

Reported speech

7

and indirect discourse. In Tobler's view, this style was a variant of direct speech. Kalepky (1899) proposed to treat the third kind as a completely autonomous rather than a mixed style, on a par with direct and indirect speech; for it, he introduced the term "veiled speech" (verschleierte Rede). The stylistic veil covers the speaker, leaving it up to the reader to determine whether the speaker of a given section of a narrative is the hero or the author. Bally (1912) thought that this style was peculiar to French and introduced the form "free indirect style" (style indirect libre), thus classifying it as a kind of indirect speech. Lorck (1921) argued that "indirect" was a misnomer for this kind of reported speech, which, moreover, was to be found not only in French but in other languages as well. He proposed the term "experienced speech" (erlebte Rede), which was criticized by Jespersen, because "the writer does not experience or "live" (erleben) these thoughts or speeches, but represents them to us" (1924: 291f.). He therefore promoted the term "represented speech" for this narrative style, which is typical for prose" where the relation of happenings in the exterior world is interrupted - very often without any transition like "he said" or "he thought" - by a report of what the person mentioned was saying or thinking at the time, as if these sayings or thoughts were the immediate continuation of the outward happenings" (1924: 291). Jespersen, like Bally, conceived of represented speech as a kind of indirect speech. In a sense, the conflicting nomenclatures reflect a disparity of grammatical form and fictional content characteristic of this style as compared with non-narrative speech. The omniscient author can freely invade other minds and relate events, utterances, and thoughts as if he were a witness to a scene to which no witness can have access. Grammatically, much of what Jespersen called "represented speech" is phrased from the point of view of the narrator, but contentwise it belongs to the hero's speech, thought, or perception.5 Lerch (1919) emphasized the latter aspect and hence chose the term "quasi-direct speech" (uneigentliche direkte Rede) which was also adopted by Voloshinov (1929), who called it "the most neutral of all terms proposed and the one entailing the least amount of theory" (1973: 141). His concern was not with providing abstract grammatical descriptions but rather to investigate reported speech from a historical point of view, in order to demonstrate how languages at different historical stages of their development perceive the words of another speaker. Forms of reported speech are at the interface of grammar and style, and as such

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they can reveal, to the careful analyst, linguistic reflections of social developments: "In the vicissitudes of the word are the vicissitudes of the society of word-users" (Voloshinov 1973: 157). Unfortunately, Voloshinov's approach did not inspire much systematic research into the interaction of grammar and style or the societal preconditions of different patterns of reported speech in different languages at different historical stages. The chapters of this book cannot close this gap, but they facilitate comparative analysis. The above review of terms proposed for reported speech of the third kind can be summarized as follows. In the following I will adopt Lech's and Voloshinov's usage. 1894 Tobler

direct speech

indirect speech

mingling of direct and indirect speech 1899 Kalepky

direct speech

indirect speech

1912 Bally

direct speech

indirect speech

veiled speech

free indirect style 1919 Lerch

direct speech

indirect speech

quasi-direct speech 1921 Lorck

repeated speech

1924 Jespersen

direct speech

experienced speech

indirect speech dependent speech

1929 Voloshinov

reported speech

represented speech

substituted discourse quasi-direct discourse indirect discourse

As an example of quasi-direct discourse consider now a passage from Beckett. (1) He begged her to believe him when he said he could not earn. (2) Had he not already sunk a small fortune in attempts to do so? (3) He begged her to believe that he was a chronic emeritus. (4) But it was not altogether a question of economy. (5) There were metaphysical considerations, in whose gloom it appeared that the night had come in which no Murphy could work. (6) Was Ixion under any contract to keep his wheel in nice running order? (7) Had any provision been made for Tantalus to eat salt? (8) Not that Murphy had ever heard of. (Samuel Beckett. 1963. Murphy. London: Calder & Boyars, p. 18).

Reported speech

9

Even though only third persons occur in this passage, both the narrator's and hero's points of view are represented to the reader. Sentence (1) is, seemingly, purely descriptive; it says something about the hero from the narrator's point of view. (2) however, is phrased like a question whose answer is known to the addressee, or rather, is made known to the addresse by the question itself, a rhetorical question, that is. This cannot be the reader as he is not directly addressed by the hero of the narration. Hence, it can only be the hero's interlocutor which implies that the question is to be understood as being phrased from the hero's point of view. But, when the author lets the hero speak, one should expect a first person subject: "Have I not already sunk . . . " Instead, we have a third person subject which would accord with the narrator's perspective. The change of perspective is brought about without any overt indication or explicit statement. In the sequel, too, both points of view are intertwined, and it is left up to the reader to disentangle them. Grammatically, it is not even clear that sentences (3) to (8) represent what Murphy says rather than his thoughts. (3) surely allows for a descriptive interpretation, that is, one from the narrator's point of view, and in the other sentences the author continues to convey his point of view, especially in (5) and (8) where he refers to the hero by name. On the other hand, except for the proper name and the tense of the verb, (8) is phrased like an expressive sentence suggesting direct discourse and, by consequence, the hero's point of view. (6) and (7) are again rhetorical questions. (8) cannot be embedded without substantial changes in the wording into a matrix sentence as indirect discourse. (15)

*Murphy said that not that he had ever heard of.

The expressive "not that . . . " belongs to the hero, the proper name and the ante-preterit to the narrator. Both points of view are fused in the same sentence. The next sentence, following (8), then makes it clear that the preceding sentences represent Murphy's utterances rather than his thoughts, as they are a reaction by Murphy's interlocutor, Celia, in direct speech: (16)

"But we cannot go on without any money", said Celia.

In quasi-direct discourse, the narrator lends his voice to the hero without giving up his own identity. Rather than formally distinguishing direct discourse from its introductory context and thus holding hero and narrator apart, the role playing (direct discourse) is interwoven with, and adjusted to, the more distanced viewpoint of the narrator. Tobler (1894)

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Coulmas

was not altogether wrong when he described quasi-direct discourse as "a peculiar mingling of direct and indirect speech," but we can also understand Voloshinov's emphatic rejection of this definition, because "quasidirect discourse is not a simple mechanical mixture or arithmetical sum of two forms but a completely new, positive tendency in active reception of another person's utterance" (Voloshinov 1973: 142).

2. What counts as the same? As a conscious stylistic device, quasi-direct discourse is a fairly recent phenomenon that developed in the 19th century, whereas the mixing, or confounding, of points of view can be observed much earlier. As a matter of fact, it seems to be typical of earlier forms of literature where the narrator had not yet mastered the artful technique of choosing and changing points of view. For Classical Greek, for instance, Rosier (1980: 303) observes the following: "Ob Autorenäußerung oder direkte Rede einer handelnden Person, macht für Heraklit keinen Unterschied."6 Similarly, Old French texts are known for this kind of disarray of points of view: "No clearly marked boundaries between direct discourse and indirect discourse existed then. The Old French storyteller was as yet unable to separate the figures of his fantasy from his own T" (Voloshinov 1970: 150). Not every melange of points of view is, therefore, to be regarded as quasi-direct discourse. Voloshinov's approach to the analysis of speech reporting was rather original, because (i) he was prepared to look for non-linguistic explanations for the presence or absence of a given kind of speech reporting in a language, and (ii) he admitted that "the borderline between grammar and style is fluid" (1973: 126). However, what his approach has in common with virtually all preceding and subsequent studies on reported speech is that he concentrates on written language, literary prose in particular. Writing is an important cultural achievement which, in contradistinction to many other such achievements, is closely liked with language. A cross-linguistic study of reported speech has to take into account the possibility that writing itself influences the way how speech reporting is carried out and understood. That writing is not simply speech written down is by now a common place (see, e.g., Tannen 1982, Coulmas

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11

1981). Anthropological studies have shown that the introduction of writing has profound effects on the development of languages and on the ways they are perceived and conceptualized by their speakers (see Goody and Watt 1968; Coulmas and Ehlich 1983). One important point is the question of what counts as the same. Anthropologists have argued that the same is not the same in oral and literate cultures. "Even the most standardised segments of oral sequences never become so standardised, so formulaic, as the products of written man. Reproduction is rarely if ever verbatim" (Goody 1977: 118).

Goody's observation seems to imply that reproduction in speech reporting is verbatim in literate societies. And, indeed, the conventions for using quotation marks, for instance in newspapers, are such that what is enclosed in quotation marks is claimed to be a verbatim rendition of what a speaker said. Direct discourse, in this understanding, means fidelity not only to the content but also to the surface form of a reported utterance. Notice, however, that the notion of fidelity to the surface form of an utterance is not self-evident. Rather, it requires explanation.

2.1. Type-token identity (17)

It is too late.

(17) can be used to make a statement about the time of day, an appointment, a schedule. But if the speaker continues, saying, (18)

This is what Othello said to Desdemona before he killed her.

then he, the speaker, makes no statement at all with (17) and does not refer to any particular time, but only reports Othello's words. It is Othello who is making the statement. The deictic word this in (18) refers to (17), and (17), in the context of (18), refers to itself. Alternatively, this could also be supplanted by (17) which would thus become the subject of (18) as in (19). (19)

"It is too late," is what Othello said to Desdemona before he killed her.

In (19) the expression enclosed in double quotes behaves much like a demonstrative which in conjunction with a physical gesture of pointing is used to identify an object. Likewise, (17) in (19) functions as a means of naming a referent by demonstration. This is what quotation is all about:

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Coulmas

The speaker does not claim authorship for a part of his utterance which he ascribes to another speaker or unspecified source. This part of his utterance does not serve a regular referential function such that words refer to things. Rather, they refer to words, not to any arbitrary words, that is, but purportedly to those words that some other speaker uttered at some other time. This functional duplicity of words which quotation exhibits so clearly and which is so important for natural languages poses a number of challenges to linguists and philosophers. 7 Analysts in the philosophical tradition, for instance, Linsky (1967), Plantinga (1969), and Quine (1960, 1966) have focused on problems of reference. "Quotation," writes Quine (1966: 159), "is the referrentially opaque context par excellence.'" Referring is, therefore, considered by some authors, notably Searle (1969), as an act rather than a property of expressions. Referring is something that people do when they use words, but not when they mention them. In quotation, the normal referential function of words is suspended, because the words that we utter when we quote are not our own. The above may look like a rather cumbersome way of saying that quoting means to repeat the words of another, but it isn't all that easy. Words are ephemeral entities and cannot be repeated in the same sense as the showing of a slide on a screen can be repeated. We can, of course, use a tape recorder and play the same recording over and over, but this is not what we usually mean by to repeat one's own or another speaker's words. What we mean is that we produce a word or words of the same type as the ones uttered by the quoted speaker. The physical tokens are singular events and as such not reproducible. Yet we can repeat the words of others and reasonably make statements such as the following: (20)

Mary just said what Othello said to Desdemona before he killed her.

Clearly, (20) does not mean that Mary reproduced the physical events that Othello once produced with his vocal tract before stifling Desdemona. Rather, what it means is that Mary produced an utterance token of the type of which Othello's utterance was also a token. Quotation in natural languages, and in other sign systems as well (see Goodman 1968), presupposes the structural possibility of establishing type-token identity for utterances, a possibility that we would want to regard as a universal feature of natural language. To repeat the words of another in the sense just explained is something that in principle can be done in any language. But notice the

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qualification, "in principle." That something can be done in principle does not imply that it is done, or that it is done in the same fashion in all natural languages. In his book Semantics, Lyons offers some interesting considerations in this connection: (21)

"John said X and so did Mary.

"John and Mary had produced two different tokens of the same type. So much is clear. The difficulty lies in specifying precisely what X can cover and the criteria for type-token identity between different instances of X . A s long as we restrict our attention to some standardized written language or operate solely with written representations of spoken forms (and especially so, if we make use of non-cursive, printed representations in a alphabetic script), we may be inclined to underestimate the difficulty of specifying the conditions under which (21) would be true or false" (Lyons 1977: 17).

Type-token identity is a rather rigid notion whose meaning, Lyons suggests, is easily understood in a literate culture where the relevancy of this principle is omnipresent, since the technique of writing, and printing in particular, is the technique of linguistic repetition. In other cultures, it may be more difficult to specify exactly what counts as the same. It is by virtue of the type-token relation that we can conceptually distinguish between reporting form and reporting content. The question of what counts as the same thus allows for different answers. It appears, however, that the awareness of this distinction is, to some extent at least, culturally determined. Not all speech communities make a rigorous distinction between "same form" and "same meaning". In a paper about oral poetry of the Limba of Sierra Leone R. Finnigan wrote: When I asked a Limba assistant to elucidate the words I could not catch fully while trying to transcribe taped stories, he could not be made to understand that I wanted the exact words on the tape. A s far as he was concerned any comparable phrase with roughly the same meaning would do. (Quoted after Olson, Hildyard 1983: 293.)

It is, maybe, a matter of debate whether one such observation warrants any general interpretation, but if it does, the implication seems to be that the distinction of form and meaning with respect to linguistic utterances is so unimportant in Limba culture that it is all but imperceptible to its members. Such cultural differences may or may not coincide with linguistic differences. So far we have no convincing theory about a causal nexus between the two. But so much is clear: Languages differ widely as regards overt distinctions between kinds of reported speech preserving content or both content and form. 8

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3. How much is coded in the grammar? "The changing sociolingual conditions of verbal communication are what in fact determines the forms of reported speech" (Voloshinov 1973: 123). No matter whether or not one is inclined to subscribe to this somewhat deterministic statement, it is an undeniable fact that "the forms of reported speech" differ greatly across languages. We find significant differences even in areas, which, at first sight, one would be tempted to take for universal rather than language specific. There are different ways of integrating reported speech into one's own; there are differences as to how reporting devices get grammatically coded; and there are differences concerning the kinds of reported speech that are distinguished in a language. Some languages have several different means of indicating whether a given report is direct or indirect: tense, mood, complementizer, and word order. German is an example where all of these grammatical devices are employed for this purpose. The distinction between direct and indirect speech is hence highly prominent. In other languages only some of the above categories are made use of. English, for instance, has no subjunctive mood, and changes in word order are fewer than in German. Thus ambiguous sentences that could be read as both direct or indirect speech are relatively more frequent than in German. They are more frequent yet in a language such as Japanese where no changes in word order or tense occur, and mood is not used to mark a piece of discourse as the speech of another as French subjonctive or German Konjunktiv. In Russian, too, indirect speech is not so clearly marked, because it has neither a subjunctive mood nor a consecutio temporum.

3.1. The sequence of tenses The so-called sequence of tenses is a grammatical feature of indirect speech that many languages lack. In some, like for instance Russian, the inflected verb in indirect speech remains in the same tense as would be used in the corresponding independent utterance, no matter how its original time reference relates to the report situation. The same is true of Hungarian (cf. Kiefer in this volume). In other cases, however, there is no back-shifting of tenses simply because there is no tense system. Yoruba may be cited as an example of this type (cf. Bamgbose: in this volume).

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An important conclusion to be drawn from the observation that there are languages that have morphological tense systems but no sequence of tenses rules is that back-shifting of tenses is a conventional phenomenon rather than a necessary consequence of tense as a grammatical category. Tense and sequence of tenses are independent features of individual grammars. Special tense rules may be developed for particular styles, such as, the Latin "epistolary tenses," in which the writer of a letter adopts the viewpoint of his reader and therefore uses preterit or perfect to refer to events that are present at the time of his writing. The backshifting of tenses in English must have evolved on the basis of similar conventions. In his famous book The Philosophy of Grammar Jespersen remarks that "the shifting of tenses in indirect speech is very natural and in many cases even inevitable" (1924: 293). But if seen from the point of view of languages with no tense system or no sequence of tenses rules it is hardly so natural. Rather, for native speakers of such languages it may be hard to understand that (22) does not mean that John referred to Mary's prettiness as a matter which now, unfortunately, belongs to the past, or why somebody's presence here is referred to in the past tense as in (23). (22) John said to Mary that she was pretty. (23) He said you were here. Shifting of tenses is "natural" within in the confines of a given grammatical system but is by no means logically necessary or implied by the presence of a tense system. Thus there is considerable cross-linguistic variation as regards the rigidity of sequence of tenses rules. Unlike English, German has both tense and mood shifts. Not all morphological forms are, however, distinct. The 1. pers. sing, present indicative form is by and large the same as the corresponding subjunctive form (except for the verb sein (to be): Ich gehe, ich nehme, ich komme, ich habe, etc.). In general, the past tense distinguishes the subjunctive mood more clearly than the present and therefore is often used where the present tense should be used if the sequence of tenses were the only determining factor. (24a) Er behauptet, ich habe das getan. He claims I did it b) Er behauptet, ich hätte das getan. (24b) is preferred over (24a) although the latter harmonizes the tenses of matrix and complement clauses in accordance with the consecutio tem-

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porum, i.e., present in the matrix clause and perfect in the complement clause, whereas the complement clause in (24b) is in plusperfect. This preference will be particularly strong when the speaker wants to express doubt or, as in (24) is not in agreement with the proposition of the reported clause. If, on the other hand, he is committed to the truth of the proposition of the complement clause he might as well choose a form that is indeterminate in its mood as in (25). (25)

Er glaubt nicht, daß ich das getan habe. He does not believe that I did it.

The sequence of tenses in German is thus not a rigid principle that requires tense forms in complement clauses to be adapted to those of their matrix sentences following a mechanical procedure, but is rather an instrument for differentiating subtle shades of meaning (cf. Wunderlich 1972). All possible combinations of matrix and complement clauses in (26) are acceptable, but the complement clauses differ with respect to the speaker's certainty about the truth of the proposition expressed. They are ordered for declining certainty. (26)

Er sagt Er sagte Er hat gesagt

a. er kommt. \ b. er werde kommen. 1 c. er komme. J d. er würde kommen, e. er käme.

Complement clause (a) (present indicative) in conjunction with any of the matrix clauses expresses a high degree of certainty on the part of the speaker; also wird er auch kommen ('that means he will come') would be a likely continuation, (d) and (e) (preterit subjunctive), on the other hand, indicate doubt and are more likely to be followed up by a negative statement, such as, aber das ist recht unwahrscheinlich ('but it is rather unlikely'). In English the sequence of tenses rules are more rigid as they do not interfere with shifting of mood. Basically, there is a rather simple grammatical rule whereby the verb in the complement clause must be shifted back into the past wherever this is possible. A past tense form in the complement clause is thus to be interpreted as present in the purported original utterance, etc. The details of this rule have been described by Jespersen (1924: 292ff.), Quirk et al. (1972: 786f.) and recently Comrie (1984). From their accounts as well as from the above observations that no back-shifting occurs in other tense languages it becomes clear that sequence of tenses rules are independent not only from tense as such but also from deictic changes.

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3.1.1. Temporal deixis As tense is, among other things, a means of time reference, it would not be alltogether unreasonable to assume that the deictic pivot determines shifting of tenses in indirect speech, because, after all, the adjustment of the subordinate clause to the deictic pivot of the reporter is one of the most conspicuous features of indirect discourse. In a paper I read at the XHIth International Congress of Linguists in Tokyo and which was published later in the Journal of Pragmatics (Coulmas 1985) I wrote the following. Changes in tense and mood required by complementation are highly language specific . . . Grammatical changes induced by embedding sentences in indirect speech vary greatly across languages. As opposed to these switches, the deictic switches have nothing to do with the grammatical form of sentences and are not language specific. Rather they are required by the logic of indirect quotation. . . . However much the grammar (and lexicalization) of deictic expressions may differ from one language to another, deictic changes necessitated by pivotal changes in speaker perspective are bound to follow the same logical principles regardless of particular languages.

I now believe that things are more difficult, and that the distinction between grammatical switches on the one hand and deictic switches on the other is not as clear-cut as I first assumed. That grammatical switches in indirect discourse vary greatly from one language to another is trivially true, because the grammars themselves are so very different. It is also true that deictic switches are conditioned by the speakers' location in space and time, that is, by the ways their utterances are pivoted in a given deictic space. However, my conclusion from these observations was rash. The fact that deixis has to do with the physical world as it is and the way a speaker is located in it and perceives it does not imply that deictic terms work in a similar fashion independent of the languages to which they belong. The consecutio temporum is where deixis and grammar meet. Consider once again temporal deixis. (27)

John said that he would come tomorrow.

In English there is only one way to read this sentence: Tomorrow refers to the day following the day on which (27) was uttered. The pivot of this deictic term is, in other words, the speech situation of the report, not the speech situation of John's original utterance. Indeed, it couldn't be otherwise, because the pivoting in the actual speech situation is the very essence of deictic terms, or is it not? Tomorrow is one of the clearest cases of a deictic word. Yet, its

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equivalents in other languages do not need to be changed in indirect reports of utterances in which they occur. As mentioned above, there is no morphological distinction in Yoruba between present and past tense. Thus, obviously no sequence of tenses rules apply. Less obvious are the reasons why time adverbs do not require any changes either. (28a)

b)

ό ηί, "ma ä lo lola." he say I will go tomorrow He said, "I will go tomorrow." ό ni oun ä lo lola. he say he will go tomorrow (Bamgbose's example, this volume)

In (28b) pronoun reference has been changed in accordance with the reporter's perspective. Lola ('tomorrow'), however, does not need to be changed, as long as its time reference is contextually clear. One might want to argue then that lola does not really mean 'tomorrow', but rather means 'the following day.' But this assumption can hardly solve the problem. Yoruba is not an exceptional case. Similar observations about choice of temporal adverbs are reproted for other languages, too. Hewitt and Crisp (this volume) have noted that the choice between the time adverb appropriate at the time of the original utterance and that whose deictic pivot is in the speech situation of the report is free in several Caucasian languages as long as it is clear from the context what day is under discussion. In the paper quoted above I stated that "in indirect speech . . . deictic expressions have to be adapted to the speech situation of the report in such a way as to be consistent with the new speaker perspective." 9 But in light of the examples just quoted this claim is no unconditionally tenable. There is no compelling reason why tense in indirect speech should not be used in accordance with the deictic center of the reported speaker. Thus, while there may be a shift of deictic center for person reference in indirect discourse relative to the purported original utterance, tense may, nonetheless, be interpreted from the viewpoint of the reported speaker. Consider the following Russian example from Comrie (1984). "Let us imagine that today is the fifteenth of May. Kolya uttered the following on the eighth of May: ja pridu cetyrnadcatogo maja Ί will arrive on the fourteenth of May.' If I report this today in Russian, then I will say: Kolja skazal, cto on pridet cetyrnadcatogo maja 'Kolya said that he would arrive (literally: will arrive) on the fourteenth of May.' The tense in this sentence is future pridet, although from the deictic centre of the report it has past time reference, given its collocation with the adverbial cetyrnadcatogo maja, which has past time reference."

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Notice that the reported sentence is clearly marked as indirect speech by the complementizer cto. Moreover, the person reference is adjusted to the deictic pivot of the reporter, the original speaker being referred to by the third person pronoun on. Yet, the tense of the verb remains the same as in Kolya's original utterance and is thus not treated as a deictic element also to be adjusted. Obviously, then, Russian allows for sentences with split deixis in indirect speech, the pronoun deixis being adjusted to the report situation while temporal deixis by means of tense forms keeps its pivot in the reported situation. Therefore, indirect speech appears to be integrated into the reporter's speech to a lesser degree than in other tense languages, such as, English or German, where tense forms cannot, or not always, stay unchanged in indirect speech.

3.2 Grammatical integration The general conclusion that follows from the above is that the extent to which reporting and reported parts of indirect discourse are harmonized and integrated with one another varies within and across languages. Li (in this volume) uses the notion of 'fusion' to refer to this integration. If we compare, for example, (29a) and (b), the Latin sentence exhibits a higher degree of integration than its English counterpart. (29a) b)

Dico Ciceronem edere oleas. I say that Cicero is eating olives.

In the English sentence what follows the complementizer that is a potentially independent sentence whose subject is in the subject case. By contrast, the reported sentence in (29a) has lost its independence completely by being put in an accusative with infinitive construction, typical of indirect discourse in Latin, where the verb of the embedded clause is non-finite and its subject appears in the accusative case.10 Greek exhibits a number of alternative constructions for indirect speech ranging from low to high integration of matrix and subordinate clause. (30a) resembles the English complement construction with that, while (30b) ist much like the Latin ACI structure. (30a) b)

Aggelei höti Küros poreütai. Aggelei Küron poreuesthai. He reports that Cyrus is on the march.

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In (30a) hoti is a complementizer comparable with English that, and what follows is like an independent sentence, which can be used to make the statement 'Cyrus is on the march.' In (30b) poreuesthai is the infinitive, its subject Küron being in the accusative case. The latter is thus more highly integrated than the former. In Greek preference for one construction or the other is conditioned by the respective report verb, but some verbs admit both. An even higher degree of integration than in ACI sentences can be found in constructions where the reported part is reduced to a noun phrase as in (31). (31a)

He asked for permission.

b)

She denied the existence of God.

c)

They announced the victory.

It may seem far-fetched to subsume sentences such as these under the notion of reported speech, but notice that they share some crucial features with indirect speech: There is a report verb and a "propositional" part. The latter is syntactically reduced to a noun phrase in object position, but then this is exactly the position that a complement sentence occupies. It is surely no coincidence that complementizers such as German daß, English that, or French que are identical in form with demonstratives or relative pronouns that point to an object. (32a)

John told Danny that. Art is art.

b)

Art is art. That is what John told Danny.

c)

John told Danny that art is art.

Functionally the thats in (32a), (b) and (c) differ. In (a) and (b) that behaves like a proform whose referent is another sentence as in That's true. But in (c) that behaves like a syntactic connector within a sentence by establishing a relation of subordination between its parts. To present day native speaker intuition these two thats are rather distinct, but this grammatical distinction has only gradually emerged from a common source. The same is true of the German complementizer daß whose spelling differentiation from the article and demonstrative das is of recent origin. Both the English and German examples show what a complement clause is: a sentential object. This is also very clearly evidenced in Japanese where the direct object particle -o can be used for embedding indirect speech (see Maynard in this volume). Thus nominal objects of report verbs as in (31) are not all that different from comple-

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ment clauses. Yet a significant difference can be seen in the respective degree of integration of reporting and reported parts of the sentence. The reduction of a proposition to a noun phrase is the extreme form of integration of reporting and reported parts in speech reporting. The other extreme is direct quotation where reporting and reported parts are distinct to the extent that they are phrased in separate sentences. Inbetween lies the interesting transition zone of indirect speech forms of varying degrees of integration. It is in this transition zone that languages differ most. The important question to ask here with respect to any given language is that of what and how much is coded in the grammar.

4. Conclusion In the above I have touched upon several lexical and grammatical devices for distinguishing the speech of another from one's own and for integrating the former into the latter. In German, for instance, we find that, in many cases, indirect speech is distinguished from direct speech by means of the subjunctive mood, which is hence often cited as the criterion of the "grammatical dependency" of indirect speech in German. 11 The sequence of tenses is another obvious case in point. It may seem indispensable for indirect speech in English or Latin, but when we look at other tense languages we realize that it is a rather contigent feature. A pronoun system enabling unequivocal reference seems to be essential for a proper interaction between reporting and reported parts of speech. Particularly important in this respect is it to distinguish reference to an individual whose speech or thought is reported from reference to other individuals. Some languages have developed such forms that are used to establish coreference with individuals whose point of view is reported in indirect discourse. Hagege (1974) introduced the term "logophoric pronouns." Their use permits a speaker to avoid ambiguity of reference in many cases. Sentences such as (33), where it depends on the context whether he refers to John, or Danny, Or a third person, may seem intolerably ambiguous from the point of view of languages employing such logophoric pronouns. 12 (33) John said to Danny that he was a lady-killer.

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Reflexive pronouns are sometimes used in logophoric function, for instance in English, as illustrated in the following example slightly adapted from Kuno (1975). (34)

Mary said to John that lady-killers like himself were a pleasure to meet.

But morphologically distinct logophoric pronoun systems are a rather special property of a few languages. Another feature worth mentioning are lexical or grammatical means of distinguishing different kinds of reported speech with respect to evidentiality, that is, the nature of the quoted source and the authenticity of the report. Bloomfield (1927) reported about Navajo that "whatever is hearsay and not the speaker's own experience has the predicate verb or predicate in a special quotative form" (see also Collins 1983). Jakobson made similar observations for other languages including Kwakiutl, Hopi, Tunica, and Bulgarian where the verb conjugation "distinguishes two semantically opposite sets of forms: 'direct narration' vs. 'indirect narration'" (1971: 135). Many languages use adverbs to differetiate degrees of authenticity. Japanese has a sentence suffix, -sö, which in conjunction with a form of the copula indicates hearsay quality. German and Danish use modal verbs for the same purpose. When used in this function, the verb sollen indicates lack of a specifiable source of information and hence the speaker's unwillingness or inability to verify the reported proposition. Its correlate wollen is used to show that the speaker reports another speaker's statement but doesn't believe it. (35)

Er soll ein Schürzenjäger sein. He is said to be (lit.: shall be) a lady-killer.

(36)

Er will gestern Nacht bei ihr gewesen sein. He claims (lit.: wants) to have been with her last night.

Some languages have grammatical devices to indicate that a given piece of discourse represents another's speech or thought without explicitly saying so. In French the report verb can be omitted, but tense and pronouns can still be used in a manner appropriate to indirect speech. Quasi-direct discourse is thus to some extent grammaticised in French (cf. Fonagy in this volume). The great variety of features that characterize reported speech across languages leaves us with the question of whether any of them need to be coded in the grammar of every language. To be sure, certain mechanisms and features peculiar to reported speech are explicitly coded in the

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grammar of many languages. Especially the use of pronouns is subject to seemingly rigid conditions (cf. Li in this volume). However, even in this domain, which is so essential for communication, we find a great range of variation. Indeed, the more we look into the details of individual grammars, the more varied the picture becomes. Most of the features that I have discussed above seem to be fairly arbitrary grammatical or pragmatic conventions of individual languages rather than logical requirements of integrating the speech of another into one's own. Mood, tense, word order, complementation, do not necessarily get categorized or categorized in the same manner in all languages. And the possibilities of differentiating kinds of reported speech and the information about speech acts encoded in report verbs seem to be even more culturally specific. However, speech reporting is essential to the nature of language nevertheless. Without it, or rather, without the structural preconditions referred to above in section 2.1., language would be fatally limited in its potential. It would not allow us to construe sentences that refer to themselves, such as the following. (37)

The sentence "The sentence may be quoted without permission" may be quoted without permission.

By consequence, we would be deprived of the means - so essential to scientific endeavors - to quote that another has quoted another as quoting another as quoting . . .

Acknowledgement Research for this paper was done while I held a Heisenberg-Fellowship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which I gratefully acknowledge. For helpful comments on an earlier draft I am indebted to Danny Steinberg. I am also grateful to the Language Institute of Gakushuin University, Tokyo, where I spent the winter of 1984/85 when I wrote this paper.

Notes 1. Lanser (1981) offers an extensive discussion of point of view in fiction. Cf. also Leech and Short (1981). 2. Example from Banfield (1973: 5). 3. I am disregarding here a third reading where his mother refers to someone else's mother.

24

Florian Coulmas I am also disregarding the obvious fact that Oedipus spoke Greek rather than English, which is not at all a minor or trivial point because the status of an allegedly verbatim quotation in a language which is not the same as that of the original utterance is far from clear. In fiction it is a common practice to represent the direct speech of a character who is identified as a foreigner using a foreign language in the same language as the main body of the text. In order to remind the reader that a foreigner is speaking, his speech is often marked with certain forms that are easily understood, such as terms of address, greetings, etc. Joseph Conrad, at home in several languages, used this technique extensively.

4.

5.

6.

7.

"The party he led were babbling excitedly in Italian and Spanish, inciting each other to the pursuit. He put himself at their head, crying, 'AvantiF 'He has not stopped very long with us. There is no praise from strangers to be got here,' Signora Teresa said, tragically. 'Avanti! Yes! that is all he cares for. To be first somewhere - somehow - to be first with these English." (Joseph Conrad. 1963. Nostromo. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 32.) A peculiar situation obtains in some diglossic speech communities where two markedly different varieties of a language coexist. To let characters speak the so-called "high variety" in fictional narrative would be very unnatural. The "low variety", however, is not usually written. Direct discourse is thus the only context where the "low variety" is put in writing. Sinhalese is a case in point. "The present situation is that all sentences within quotation marks in novels are generally written in spoken idiom while the rest of the narrative is predominantly cast in the classical format" (De Silva 1976: 98). Speech reporting may thus eventually exercise an influence on the development of a language by introducing the spoken vernacular into the written medium. The interaction can also work the other way: Speakers may quote written forms in the spoken language, as Keller has noted in his account of diglossia in Germanspeaking Switzerland. "Frequently one is not quite sure whether the speaker is not simply quoting something in the 'High' variety. Quoting is in fact very often the first step to borrowing and is a characteristic of the breakdown of the diglossia situation" (Keller 1982: 86). See also Traugott (1981). Cf. also Lorck (1921: 16): "Auf die Tatsache, daß es außer der direkten und der indirekten Rede noch eine dritte Darstellungsweise des gesprochenen Worts gebe, hat zuerst A. Tobler hingewiesen . . . Nach seinem Dafürhalten lag eine Variante der direkten Rede vor, die durch eine eigentümliche Mischung dieser und der indirekten Rede entstanden sei." Neubert (1957: 8f.) gives a useful chronological overview of the many different terms proposed by writers on the subject of reported speech between 1894 und 1954. He adopts Lorck's term erlebte Rede. See also McHale (1978). Rosier (1980) investigates the development, or what he calls the discovery, of fiction in Classical Greek which he explains as an outgrowth of literacy, that is, as part of the transition from a oral to a literature culture. This duplicity is generally referred to as the "use" vs. "mention" distinction. A term is used whenever it refers to something other than itself. It is mentioned when it serves the meta-linguistic function of naming itself. This distinction is vital as it enables language to function as its own meta-language, a property which is also known as "reflexivity."

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Hockett includes reflexivity in his list of universale of human language which he deduced through comparison with animal sign systems: "In a language, one can communicate about communication" (1963: 13). A more general way of capturing this property of language, he suggests, is to say that in a language one can communicate about anything. Such a position is, however, much harder to defend. There may be things whose existence we cannot recognize because we cannot communicate about them in natural languages. For our purposes, we can leave this philosophical problem aside and register the fact that the metalinguistic function of natural languages is logically necessary and hence universal. Metalinguistic terms, for instance performative verbs, have been taken as the vantage point for the analysis of speech acts by philosophers notably Austin (1965) and Searle (1969). Investigations growing out of an ethnographic tradition which have become known as ethnosemantics suggest that these philosophical treatments are somewhat ethnocentric. Metalinguistic taxonomies reflect how speakers categorize their verbal behavior and how speech events fit into a cultural matrix. Such taxonomies differ widely across languages, see e.g., Sapir (1915), Frake (1962), Stross (1972). There is no reason to believe that metalinguistic taxonomies of European languages, English in particular, provide more general insights into universal principles of the organization of verbal behavior than those of other languages which have received less attention by speech act theorists. For a summary of the extensive literature about use and mention see Zabeeh et al. (1974: 20-31). 8. Two points should be carefully distinguished here: (1) the question of identity and (2) the question of style. Whether type-token identity holds for two utterances is a question not to be confused with the stylistic option that allows us to speak as if we were repeating the "exact words" of another speaker. That exact repetion of form and meaning is very rare in actual language use is well-known by psychologists and rhetoricians. Experimental studies of the linguistic memory have shown that "memory for form appears to be tied to memory for meaning" (Olson, Hildyard 1983: 291) and that, therefore, long term memory for language "is rarely word for word, verbatim memory" (ibid. 294). Moreover, there are different criteria for identity. While semanticists may argue that, except for ironic utterances and other conventional distortions of meaning, identity of meaning is implied by identity of form, rhetoricians would not agree as is obvious from the following. "Even the words of other people, when repeated by a speaker, have changed their meaning, for in the process of repetition he always adopts toward them a position that is in some way new, even if only in the degree of importance he attaches to them" (Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 317). 9. The necessity of adapting deictic terms in indirect speech to the reporter's viewpoint was also stipulated by other authors. Wunderlich, for example, makes no qualification as for the language for which his general statement is supposed to be true. "Im indirekten Zitat müssen sich alle deiktischen Ausdrücke . . . auf den zitierenden Sprecher selbst beziehen, er muß also die ursprünglichen Ausdrücke entsprechend seiner Position transformieren" (Wunderlich 1972: 164). 10. Notice the accusative whom as a subject in the context of a verbum dicendi in Shakespeare's sentence "Arthur whom they say is killed to-night" (John IV, 2.165). Jespersen (1924: 117, 348) has described this phenomenon for which he cites a great many examples as "an accusative + a finite verb dependent on a verb inserted after the

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accusative." Whom could not be the subject of the relative clause if it wasn't for the "paranthetical" they say which thus exercises an influence on the grammatical structure by reducing the embedded clause's independence. 11. "Die indirekte Rede im Deutschen muß jetzt als etwas grammatisch Abhängiges betrachtet werden, und das Kennzeichen der Abhängigkeit dabei ist der Konjunktiv" (Paul 1909: 146). 12. The study of logophoric pronouns has concentrated on West African languages where their occurrence is common. See, for example, Clements (1975) for Ewe, Hyman and Comrie (1981) for Gokana, and Perrin (1974) for Mambila; also Bamgbose in this volume for Yoruba.

References Austin, J. L. 1965. How to Do Things with Words. New York: Oxford University Press. Bally, Charles. 1912. Le style indirect libre en f r a ^ a i s moderne. Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift IV: 549ff. Banfield, Ann. 1973. Narrative Style and the Grammar of Direct and Indirect Speech. Foundations of Language 10: 1-39. Bloomfield, Leonard. 1927. Literate and Illiterate Speech. American Speech 2, 10: 432-439. Clements, George N. 1975. The Logophoric Pronoun in Ewe: Its role in Discourse. Journal of West African Languages 10: 141-77. Collins, James. 1983. Reported Speech in Navajo Myth Narratives. To appear in J. Verschueren, ed., Linguistic Action: Some Empirical-Conceptual Studies.. Comrie, Bernard. 1984. Tense. London: Cambridge University Press. Coulmas, Florian. 1981. Über Schrift. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Coulmas, Florian. 1982. Some Remarks on Japanese Deictics. In: J. Weissenborn and W. Klein, eds., Here and There: Cross-linguistic Studies on Deixis and Demonstration. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publ. Coulmas, Florian. 1985. Direct and Indirect Speech. General Problems and Problems of Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 9: 41-63. Coulmas, Florian and Konrad Ehlich, eds. 1983. Writing in Focus. Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton. DeSilva, Μ. W. Sugathapala. 1976. Diglossia and Literacy. Mansagangotri, Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages. Frake, Charles. 1962. TTie Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems. In: T. Gladwin and W. C. Sturtevant, eds., Anthropology and Human Behavior. Washington, D . C . : Anthropological Society. Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Comp. Goody, Jack. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack and Ian Watt. 1968. The Consequences of Literacy. In: J. Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies. London: Cambridge University Press. Greenberg, Joseph H., ed., 1963. Universals of Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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Hagege, Claude. 1974. Les pronoms logophoriques. Bulletin de la Societe de Linguistique de Paris 69 (1): 287-310. Hockett, Charles F. 1963. The Problem of Universals in Language. In: J. H. Greenberg, ed., 1963 Universals of Language: 1-29. Hyman, Larry and Bernard Comrie. 1981. Logophoric Reference in Gokana. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 3: 19-37. Jakobson, Roman. 1971. Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb. Selected Writings II. The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 130-147. Jespersen, Otto. 1924. The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen and Unwin. Kalepky, T. 1899. Zur französischen Syntax. Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie XXIII: 491-513. Keil, Frank C. 1981. Constraints on Knowledge and Cognitive Development. Psychological Review 88: 197-227. Keller, R. E. 1982. Diglossia in German-speaking Switzerland. In: W. Haas, ed., Standard Languages, Spoken and Written. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kuno, Susumu. 1972. Pronominalization. Reflexivization, and Direct Discourse. Linguistic Inquiry 3: 161-96. Kuno, Susumu. 1975. Three Perspectives in the Functional Approach to Syntax. In Papers from the Parasession on Functionalism. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 276-336. Lanser, Susan S. 1981. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Linsky, Leonard. 1967. Referring. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Leech, Geoffrey N. and Michael Short. 1981. Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction To English Fictional Prose. New York: Longman. Lerch, Gertraud. 1919. Uneigentliche direkte Rede. Diss. Munich. Lorck, Etienne, 1921. Die erlebte Rede. Eine sprachliche Untersuchung. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McHale, Brian. 1978. Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts. PTL 3: 249-288. Neubert, Albrecht. 1957. Die Stilformen der "erlebten Rede" im neueren englischen Roman. Halle: Niemeyer. Okutsu, K. 1970. Inyö kozö to kansetsuka tenkei. (Quotation Structure and Indirectification). Gengo kenkyü 56: 1-26. Olson, David R. and Angela Hildyard. 1983. Literacy and the Comprehension and Expression of Literal Meaning. In: F. Coulmas and K. Ehlich, eds., 1983. Writing in Focus, Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton. Partee, Barbara Hall. 1973. The Syntax and Semantics of Quotation. In: S. Anderson, P. Kiparsky, eds., A Festschrift for Morris Halle. New York: Holt, 410-18. Paul, Hermann. 19094. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle: Niemeyer. Perelman, Ch. and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1969. The New Rhetoric. A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame, London: University of Notre Dame Press. Perrin, Mona. 1974. Direct and Indirect Speech in Mambila. Journal of Linguistics 10, 27-37. Plantinga, A. 1969. De Re et De Dicto. Nous III, 3: 235-58. Quine, W. V. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Quine, W. V. 1966. Three Grades of Modal Involvement. In: The Ways of Paradox. New York: Random House.

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Quirk, Randolph et al. 1972. A Grammar of Contemporary English. London: Longman. Rosier, Wolfgang. 1980. Die Entdeckung der Fiktionalität in der Antike. Poetica 12, 3-4: 283-319. Sapir, Edward. 1915. Abnormal Types of Speech in Nootka. Ottawa. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts. London, New York: Cambridge University Press. Stross, B. 1972. Speaking of Speaking: Tenejapa Tzeltal Metalinguistics. In: Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. E. Baumann, J. Sherzer, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 213-39. Tannen, Deborah, ed. 1982. Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy. Norwood, N. J.: Ablex. Tobler, A. 1894. Vermischte Beiträge zur französischen Grammatik II. Leipzig. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1981. The Voice of Varied Linguistic and Cultural Groups in Fiction: Some Criteria for the Use of Language Varieties in Writing. In: Writing: The Nature, Development, and Teaching of Written Communication. Vol. I, Variation in Writing. Marcia Farr Whiteman, ed. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Voloshinov, V. N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Seminar Press. (First Russian edition 1929.) Wierzbicka, Anna. 1974. The Semantics of Direct and Indirect Discourse. Papers in Linguistics 7, 3-4: 267-307. Wunderlich, Dieter. 1972. Redeerwähnung. In: Pragmatik und sprachliches Handeln. U. Maas, D. Wunderlich, Frankfurt: Athenäum, 161-88. Zabeeh, F., E. D. Riemke, A. Jacobson. 1974. Readings in Semantics. Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Direct speech and indirect speech: A functional study* Charles N. Li

1. Introduction Direct speech and indirect speech are similar, yet different. Consider two examples, one illustrating direct speech, the other indirect speech: (1) John said, "I'm tired." (2) John said (that) he was tired. Let us first observe the similarities between (1) and (2). Both have the same verb, "said" with the same subject, "John". Each contains a clause signalling the content of a speech act. Although the two clauses are different in form, they both convey the same message. Thus, at first sight, the similarities between (1) and (2) appear so striking that early transformationalists were motivated to propose that (2) should be derived from (1) via an optional transformation called the "Indirect Discourse Formation". 1 The differences between (1) and (2), on the other hand, are manifold. The most readily observable ones are syntactic: first, the pronouns in (1) and (2) are different; second, the tenses in (1) and (2) are different; third, (2) but not (1) may have the complimentizer "that". Finally, Longacre (1976) noted that the immediate constituent grouping in terms of phonological pause and intonation pattern is different between (1) and (2). But the phonologic grouping of the subject and the verb of saying holds true only in verb-medial languages. In verb-final languages, for example, a direct quote is often placed between the subject and the verb of saying. On the semantic level, Partee (1971) noticed that the surface form of the direct quote, i.e. the exact wording of the quotation, is part of the meaning of the whole sentence. Thus, even if we accept the synonymity of (3) and (4), * Preparation of this article was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 83-08220.

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Charles Ν. Li

(3) John said that this theorem was false. (4) John said that this theorem was not true, we cannot consider (5) and (6) synonymous. (5) John said, "This theorem is false." (6) John said, "This theorem is not true." In other words, even though "This theorem is false" is equivalent to "This theorem is not true", these represent two different utterances. (5) and (6) each attribute a different utterance to John, and, therefore, cannot be synonymous. This observation led Partee (1971) and others to reject the transformational derivation of indirect speech from direct speech. On the functional level, Wierzbicka (1974) pointed out that direct speech is characterized by its "theatrical" nature. 2 Wierzbicka's analysis of direct and indirect speech is insightful. In this article, I will pursue the implications of Wierzbicka's study in light of evidence from a variety of languages. Unlike Wierzbicka, however, I will not be concerned with such questions of generative linguistics as "What is the underlying representation of a sentence" or "Does direct speech underly indirect speech". The theoretical thrust of this study is a functional one, i.e., I will examine the structure of direct and indirect speech in terms of their communicative functions.

2. The syntax of direct and indirect speech 2.1. Pronominalization In section I, it was stated that the pronouns in sentences (1) and (2) are different. Among all languages which have both direct and indirect speech, the existence of different pronominalization strategies for the two constructions is universal. I will state the various strategies as follows. A:

The first and second person pronoun in a direct quote are respectively co-referential with the reported speaker and the reported addressee in the clause immediately outside of the quotation.

The following illustrate strategy A:

Direct and indirect speech

(7)

John said to Mary, "I love you."

(8)

John told Mary that Peter said to Ellen, "I love you."

31

Sentences (7) and (8) demonstrate that the references of the first and second pronouns in a quotation are conditioned by the reported speaker and the reported addressee in the clause immediately outside the quotation. B:

The third person pronoun in a direct quote must not be co-referential with the reported speaker or the reported addressee in the clause immediately outside the quotation.

Consider the following examples: (9)

John said to Peter, "He was sick."

(10)

John said to Mary, "Peter told Ellen that he loved her."

(11)

About Peter, John said to Paul, "He was sick."

In sentence (9), the third person pronoun in the quote cannot be coreferential with either "John" or "Peter", the reported speaker and the reported addressee respectively, in the clause immediately outside the quotation. Sentence (10) contains an indirect quote embedded in a direct quote. Again, the third person pronouns in (10) cannot be co-referential with either "John" or "Mary", the reported speaker and the reported addressee respectively, in the clause immediately outside the quote. In sentence (11), the third person pronoun in the quote is co-referential with "Peter", an NP which is neither the reported speaker nor the reported addressee. Let us now examine pronominalization strategies in indirect speech. C:

The I ^ r S t , 1 person in an indirect quote refers to either ( second J

®

r Pr eeSPeaker}- 00

{ d s

re

P°rted {

SeJL

}

*

the direct quote in which that indirect quote is embedded. For example, (12)

John told Mary that I love you.

(13)

John said to Mary, "Peter told Ellen that I love you."

(14)

You told me that I took you to San Francisco last year.

In (12), the first and second person pronouns in the indirect quote refer respectively to the reporter-speaker and the addressee. In (13), the first

32

Charles Ν. Li

and second person pronouns are in an indirect quote embedded in a direct quote, and therefore, refer respectively to the reported speaker and the reported addressee of the direct quote. (14) shows that if the clause with the verb of saying contains first and second persons, which are co-referential with the reporter-speaker and addressee respectively, then these pronouns are co-referential with the first and second person pronouns respectively in the indirect quote. D:

Third person pronominalization in an indirect quote follows the general rule of pronominalization in a language.

In other words, there is no constraint peculiar to indirect speech governing the reference of a third person pronoun in an indirect quote. If a language allows a pronoun to refer only to an antecedent noun phrase, then a third person pronoun in an indirect quote may be co-referential with any antecedent noun phrase in the discourse. For example, in the Mandarin Chinese sentence (15), the third person pronoun in the indirect quote may be co-referential with any preceding NP in the sentence or in the preceding discourse.

(15)

Zhangsan dui Lisi shuo Wanger juede fa hen qiguai Λ * ~t Zhangsan to Lisi say Wanger feel s/he very strange. Zhangsan said to Lisi that Wanger felt s/he was very strange.

If a language, such as English, allows the "preceding" rule of pronoun reference to be superseded under certain conditions (e.g. a pronoun may be co-referential with a following NP if the pronoun is in certain subordinate clauses while the NP is in the main clause), the same condition will allow the reference of a third person pronoun in an indirect quote to supersede the "preceding" rule. Sentence (16) illustrates this: (16)

John said to Peter that before he left, Paul was O.K.

I have gone to some length describing the referential strategy of pronouns in direct and indirect speech because it is often the only diagnostic criterion available in many languages for distinguishing a direct quote from an indirect quote out of discourse context. Consider, for example, the following sentence from Mandarin Chinese:

Direct and indirect speech

(17)

Zhangsan shuo wo Zhangsan say I Zhangsan says I'm

33

lei le tire Perfective tired.

If the first person pronoun wo "I" is co-referential with Zhangsan, we know that (17) contains a direct quote on the basis of A. However, if wo "I" is co-referential with the reporter-speaker of sentence (17), we can conclude on the basis of the principle stated in C that (17) has an indirect quote. Some languages have unusual pronominal strategies in direct and indirect speech. Mambila, a Bantu language described by Perrin (1974) is a good example. Mambila has a special pronoun neh which occurs only in reported speech and which refers only to the reported speaker. The following Mambila sentences are taken from Perrin (1974): (18)

woo jia neh a neh nda you say me to reported go speaker You said to me you would go.

(18) alone cannot establish whether a clause containing neh is a direct quote or an indirect quote since neh merely refers to the reported speaker without distinguishing first, second or third person. Sentence (19) shows that neh occurs in an indirect quote (on the basis of Β) since the third person pronoun bu is co-referential with the reported addresse, torn "rabbit". (19)

Ψ

Alhaji jia torn Alhaji say rabbit

^

a neh kwuli bu to reported thank third person speaker pronoun Alhaji said to the rabbit that he thanked him.

Similarly, (20) shows that neh occurs in an indirect quote (on the basis of C (i)) since the second person pronoun chi "your" is co-referential with the second person pronoun in the matrix clause, which, in turn, is co-referential with the reporter-speaker. (20)

woo jia meh a heh neh derua a chi you say me to give reported book genitive your speaker You told me to give you your book.

The evidence cited by Perrin (1974) indicates that neh occurs only in indirect quotes, contrary to her claim that neh is used only in direct quotes. 3

34

Charles Ν. Li

2.2. Deictics Besides pronouns, deictics such as 'this/that', 'here/there', 'now/then' and 'come/go' constitute another domain in which systematic differences exist between direct and indirect speech. Let me illustrate with an example. First, consider the speech context in which, at school, John said to Paul in the presence of Peter, "Come here and take care of this mess!". Secondly consider a different speech context in which Peter was telling some people at home several days later what transpired between John and Paul. If Peter were to give a direct quote of what John said, he would say: (21)

John told Paul, "Come here and take care of this mess!"

However, if Peter were to render John's words in an indirect quote, he would say: (22)

John told Paul to go there and take care of that mess.

The difference between (21) and (22) lies in the use of opposite members of such deictic pairs as 'come/go', 'here/there', and 'this/that'. The reason behind the choice of opposite members of these deictic pairs is the different points of reference. In an indirect quote, the speaker normally uses himself/herself as a spatial point of reference and the time of utterance as a temporal point of reference. In a direct quote, the speaker must suspend the normal practice and use the points of reference of the quoted speaker.

2.3. Syntactic and semantic role An indirect quote is traditionally assumed to be a subordinate clause serving as the direct object of the verb of saying. Partee (1973) suggested that the direct quote is not a syntactic or semantic part of the sentence containing it, but did not question the subordinate clause role of the indirect quote. Munro (1982) pointed out a variety of syntactic differences between sentences containing indirect quotes and sentences containing direct quotes in many languages, further strengthening our impression of the different syntactic and semantic roles of the direct and indirect quote. Whereas the fact that direct quote and indirect quotes are different syntactically and semantically is incontrovertible, the nature of their differences may vary from language to language. In English, for

Direct and indirect speech

35

example, aside from pronominalization and deictics discussed above, we can cite at least three syntactic differences between the direct and indirect quotes: (i) the complementizer, "that", may occur with an indirect quote but not with a direct quote; (ii) the indirect quote but not the direct quote must bear the same tense as the verb of saying; (iii) there is an absence of an intonation break between a direct quote and the verb of saying, but not between an indirect quote and the verb of saying. On the other hand, the English verb, "say", in its unstressed form, is often semantically bleached and displays the characteristics of a hearsay evidential. This hearsay evidential characteristic of "say" is especially prominent when the indirect quote is fronted as in (23): (23)

He didn't want to play tennis, John said.

If we contrast (23) with (24) containing a direct quote, (24)

"I don't want to play tennis", John said.

we can observe that the differences between the syntactic-semantic roles of the direct quote and the indirect quote are minimal. Neither the direct quote of (24) nor the indirect quote of (23) seem to play the role of the direct object or patient of the verb of saying. Since the semantic function of "say" tends to lean in the direction of a hearsay evidential or an epistemic quantifier, the new information transmitted by sentences such as (23) and (24) rests in the quoted speech, whether it is direct or indirect. Let us consider another language, Tikar. 4 In Tikar, it is the direct quote, but not the indirect quote, which must be introduced by the complementizer /ε. Sentences (25) and (26) are examples of direct quotes in Tikar: f

t

*

.

* .

(25)

SWE she Ιέ nü/ε wu limmi kä 1ε mü bäeni mwum Ιέ kirn ant say to him that you know not that I caught man with force-Q The ant said to him, "Don't you know that I caught a man by force?"

(26)

Α she Ιέ kpulu ίε Kpulu wu yibä mü ndem he say to turtle that Turtle, you stole me field He said to the turtle, "Turtle, you stole my field!"

The pronominalization strategy indicated by the co-referentiality in (25) and (26) shows that the sentences contain direct quotes. According to Jackson (personal communication), one of the forms of indirect speech in Tikar occurs without a verb of saying and without a complementizer. Sentences (27) and (28) illustrate:

36

Charles Ν. Li

(27)

Nü, nü nywael ime hje he he escapes starvation He (said/thought) he's escaped starvation.

(28)

Foro nü, nü ywime Bs Hyena he he F U T arrive The hyena, he (says) he will come.

Τ

T

T

V

V

The use of the third person pronoun in (27) and (28) referring to the reported speaker demonstrates that both contain indirect quotes. The English and Tikar examples suggest that the differences between direct and indirect speech can vary dramatically from language to language and that their differences cannot be accounted for by the claim that the indirect quote is a complement of the verb of saying, whereas the direct quote is not a syntactic or semantic part of the sentence containing it. Haiman and Thompson (1984) reject the contention that indirect quote is "subordinate" in a variety of ways that the direct quote is not. To the extent that Haiman and Thompson (1984) are correct in showing that the traditional notion of "subordination" is merely a cover term for a number of independent properties describing clausal relations, it is best not to subsume the syntactic and semantic differences between direct and indirect quote under "subordination". Instead, it might be profitable to consider those differences along a dimension of "fusion" between clauses. Givon (1980) proposed a similiar notion, "binding", which refers to the influence of the main clause agent over the complement clause agent. "Fusion" can be interpreted as referring to the degree of syntactic-semantic influence or control of one clause over another in interclausal relationships. The following examples show an increasing degree of syntactic-semantic influence of the first clause over the second and therefore, display a higher degree of fusion between the two clauses from sentence to sentence: (29)

John went to school and Mary stayed home.

(30)

John lived in a bad district, but was robbed only once.

(31)

John claimed that Peter went to school.

(32)

John ordered Peter to go to school.

(33)

John remembered to go to school.

In (29), the two clauses are independent syntactically and semantically. The only clausal relationship conveyed by (29) is that according to

Direct and indirect speech

37

the view of the speaker, there is a vague pragmatic bond between the events denoted by the two clauses. (30) demonstrates a higher degree of the fusion between its two clauses than (29) because the subject of the second clause must be interpreted as co-referential with the subject of the first clause. In (31), the second clause is incorporated into the first clause as a constituent, indicating greater fusion than either (29) or (30). In (32) and (33), the second clauses are not only incorporated into their respective first clauses, but they have also lost their independent clause structure. For instance, the verb of the second clauses of (32) and (33) is non-finite, and its tense and aspect must be interpreted according to that of the verb of the first clause. Finally, (33) shows a greater degree of fusion than (32) because the truth value of the second clause in (33), but not in (32), is determined by the truth value of the first clause. Thus "John remembered to go to school" implies "John went to school", whereas "John didn't remember to go to school" implies that "John didn't go to school". 5 Both the direct quote and the indirect quote are on the weak end of the fusion scale in terms of their respective relationships with the verb of saying. One reason for this is that the verb of saying tends to take on the features of a hearsay evidential. However, the direct quote is even more weakly fused with the verb of saying than the indirect quote. Thus, only the direct quote has the full latitude of an independent sentence. For instance, only the direct quote, but not the indirect quote, may take the form of a performative speech act such as a command or a question: (34)

John said, "What did Mary buy?"

(35)

John said, "Be quiet!"

In most languages, the indirect quote has some feature which signals that it is more fused with the clause containing the verb of saying than the direct quote. Examples of such features were cited by Munro (1982) as evidence that the indirect quote, but not the direct quote, behaves as the object of the verb of saying.

3. Functional characteristics of direct and indirect speech Let us recall sentences (1) and (2), the two simple examples of direct and indirect speech in English: (1)

John said, "I'm tired."

(2)

John said (that) he was tired.

38

Charles Ν. Li

Consider the two sentences in a communicative context. Both involve four elements: i) ii) iii) iv)

the the the the

reported speaker or the original speaker reported speech reporter-speaker or simply the speaker hearer or the addressee

In direct speech, the reporter-speaker plays the role of the reported/ original speaker. The reporter-speaker intends for the hearer to believe that the form, the content and the non-verbal messages such as gestures and facial expressions of the reported speech originate from the reported speaker. That is where the theatrical feature noted by Wierzbicka comes in: the reporter-speaker acts as the reported speaker when s/he utters the direct quote. The full communicative picture of sentence (1), then, is composed of two parts. In one part, the reporter-speaker identifies the reported speaker. In the other part, the reporter-speaker acts as the reported speaker. The full communicative situation may be represented by (36): (36i)

reporter-speaker identifies reported speaker reporter-

ϋ) speaker

acts as reported => speaker -

[form] [content] " non-verbal .messages .

direct reported speech

In indirect speech, the reporter-speaker does not play the role of the reported speaker.6 The form and the non-verbal messages of the reported speech belong to the reporter-speaker. The reporter-speaker intends for the hearer to believe that only the content of the reported speech originates from the reported speaker. Thus, the communicative situation involving a sentence such as (2) may be depicted in (37). (37i) ii)

reporter-speaker identifies reported speaker [form] non-verbal reporter-speaker .messages reported speaker

[content]

indirect reported speech

Given (37), we can understand how the reporter-speaker may communicate his own feelings through the form (e.g. intonation) and non-verbal messages of the reported speech as a comment on the content of the reported speech. Sentence (2), for example, may be uttered with a great deal of disgust, anger, or sarcasm. Such emotional overtones would be

Direct and indirect speech

39

communicated by the intonation, gestures and facial expression of the reporter-speaker. The hearer will understand that those emotional overtones do not originate from the reported speaker, but constitute a comment by the reporter-speaker on either the reported speaker or the content of the reported speech or both. In direct speech, the reporter-speaker does not have the option of communicating a comment on the content of the reported speech as s/he utters the direct quote, because as (36) shows, not only the form and the content of the reported speech, but also the non-verbal messages accompanying it, originate from the reported speaker. Thus, if the reporterspeaker utters the reported speech with anger, for instance, the hearer will interpret the anger as part of the message originally communicated by the reported speaker. The analysis provided in (36) and (37) should make it clear why sentences such as (5) and (6) cannot be synonymous. (5)

John said, "This theorem is false."

(6)

John said, "This theorem is not true."

The analysis in (36) and (37) should also make it clear why a direct quote should have the full latitude of an independent sentence: the form (not only the substance) the direct quote also originates from the reported speaker.

4. Corroborative evidence In this section I will cite four pieces of evidence which corroborate the preceding functional analysis of direct and indirect speech.

4.1. Languages without indirect speech Direct speech is universal; indirect speech is not. Paez,7 for example, is a language without indirect speech. Gerdel and Slocum (1976) noted that "indirect quotation sentences" in Paez only employ verbs such as "know", "see", . . . etc., as their matrix verb. There is no Paez indirect quotation sentence whose matrix verb is a verb of saying. Other known examples of languages without indirect speech are Navajo and Amharic.

40

Charles Ν. Li

The analysis in Section III shows that indirect speech is a more complex communicative strategy than direct speech. Direct speech involves reproducing or mimicking the speech of the reported speaker, whereas indirect speech involves rephrasing or paraphrasing the speech of the reported speaker. Clearly, mimicking is a simpler undertaking than paraphrasing. Hence, it is not surprising that for reported speech the mimicking strategy occurs in all languages, whereas the paraphrasing strategy does not. After all, mimicking is employed from the onset of first language acquisition. It is an innate ability in human beings, pongid and many simian species. There is also a cultural reason for the non-occurrence of indirect speech in languages such as Paez. In Paez culture, a person is not allowed to quote by taking the responsibility for the quote himself/ herself - which is the implication of an indirect quote. A quote must be entirely attributable to the original speaker, in form and content - which is the strategy of a direct quote.

4.2. The use of direct quote in narrative Several of the linguists who participated in the project "Study of Discourse from Folk Literature in Aboriginal Languages of Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador" reported that direct quote, but not indirect quote, typically occurs as the peak of narrative. Mansen and Mansen (1976) noted that quotes and dialogue fill the content of the peak of Guajiro 8 narrative. Waltz (1976) observed that direct speech is often used at the peak of Guanano 9 narrative. Borman (1977) stated that quotes, including onomatopoetic quotes, and dialogue lend vividness to the peak episodes of Cofan 10 narrative. Witte (1977) pointed out that quotes and dialogue occur most prominently at the peak of Andoke 11 narrative and that they contribute to the vividness at the narrative peak. The observations cited above corroborate Wierzbicka's theatrical feature of direct speech. Since direct speech requires the reporterspeaker to act out the role of the reported speaker, it is a natural vehicle for vivid and dramatic presentation. Thus, direct quote is the most common mode of expression at the peak of oral narrative in many languages.

Direct and indirect speech

41

4.3. Speaker's involvement Chafe (1982) pointed out that direct quotes express the reporter-speaker's involvement in the events s/he is reporting. Schwartz (personal communication) has noted that when his children become very involved in the events they are recounting, they use direct quotes exclusively, often with "go" as the verb of saying. A natural consequence of involvement in the event one is reporting is to act out the event. That is precisely what direct speech is: the reporter-speaker acting out the role of the reported speaker.

5. Evidentials and direct/indirect speech Evidentials specify the nature of the source of information in speech: Is it hearsay or the speaker's own previous experience? Is it imagination or conjecture? The function of evidentials is to enable the speaker and hearer to gauge the authenticity of a statement. Thus, direct quote and indirect quote are forms of evidentiality. A direct quote communicates a more authentic piece of information than an indirect quote in the sense that a direct quote implies a greater fidelity to the source of information that an indirect quote. Languages which do not have indirect speech may be viewed as languages which do not allow adulteration of the source of information in reported speech. Some languages which have both direct and indirect speech allow the use of indirect speech only if the reporterspeaker is unsure about the original speech. Cuiva12 is such an example, although in her study of Cuiva discourse, Kerr (1977) states that Cuiva indirect speech also occurs when the reporter-speaker translates an original speech into another language for the benefit of the hearer. Kerr (1977) writes: "Because [the reporter-speaker] cannot use a direct quote in such circumstances, he uses an indirect quote to relay the substance of what was said in the other language" (p. 155). Thurgood (1981) pointed out that direct speech and indirect speech are manifestations of evidentiality in English grammar. Modern English, however, has also developed other forms of reported speech. One frequently cited form is "free indirect speech" which contains the features of both direct and indirect speech. An example cited by Polanyi (1982) is,

42

Charles Ν. Li

(38)

And he was telling Dolly, I don't want Dolly.

The co-reference between the reported speaker and the first person pronoun in (38) indicates direct speech. But the presence of "Dolly" instead of a second person pronoun "you" points to indirect speech. Free indirect speech, then, is a device which simultaneously presents the third person perspective of the reporter-speaker and the first person perspective of the reported speaker. Such a device sacrifices the distinction between direct and indirect speech in terms of evidentiality.13

6. Conclusion I have presented a functional analysis of direct and indirect speech in this study. The analysis corroborartes a number of phenomena observed in a wide variety of languages. Problems such as "What is the underlying representation?" or more specifically, "Does direct speech underly indirect speech?" might have motivated earlier investigators to examine the relation between meaning and structure. However, they do not lead us to a better understanding of either the structure or the function of language. In addition, looking at grammar in terms of problems of that sort may lead to pvseudo-problems. For example, Wierzbicka's insightful study (1974) incorporated into her notion of underlying representation pragmatic information describing the communicative functions of direct and indirect speech; but she also created some pseudo-problems, because her study was carried out within the theoretical framework of generative linguistics. Thus, after postulating elaborate underlying representations which capture most of the features of direct and indirect speech, she conceded that those underlying representations could not account for such utterances as (39)

John told Peter something.

But (39) is simply a case of indirect speech in which the reporter-speaker has suppressed the content of the reported speech. In terms of the analysis provided in (37), the utterance (39) may be represented as follows: (40i)

reporter-speaker identifies reported speaker

Direct and indirect speech

reporter-speaker —»

[form] non-verbal .messages

reported-speaker —>

[content]

43

indirect reported speech

The reason for preferring a functional approach to the study of language is straigthforward: language serves homo sapiens as their means of communication. If a language is a means of communication, then, it is clear that its structure must be adapted to its communicative function.

Acknowledgement I wish to thank Sandra S. Thompson for bringing to my attention various items of literature on the subject of direct and indirect speech. I also wish to thank Arthur Schwartz for discussing with me the nature of direct and indirect speech. Finally, I am grateful to Talmy Givön, Ellen Jackson, Petr Sgall and Sandra Thompson for their important comments, suggestions and criticism of an earlier version of this paper.

Notes 1. See Kuno (1972) in which the direct speech sentence is postulated not only as the underlying representation of indirect speech sentences with such matrix verbs as "expect", "claim", "worry", "believe", etc. . . . 2. Wierzbicka (1974) considers the theatrical nature of direct speech as part of the meaning of direct speech. Clearly, she uses the term 'meaning' in a broad sense to include not only the lexical and grammatical meanings, but also the communicative function of the utterance. 3. Perrin claims that neh is used in direct quote because (i) it only refers to the reported speaker in the matrix clause, and (ii) only direct speech takes its pronoun orientation from the clause in which it is immediately embedded. Since (ii) is clearly false (see Β und D above), Perrin's claim is vacuous unless sentences such as the following [(a)] are acceptable in Mambila: (a)

Alhaji jia torn a neh kwull woo Alhaji say rabbit to reported thank you speaker The co-referentiality between torn "rabbit" und woo "you" would establish (on the basis of a above) that the clause neh kwull woo is a direct quote. 4. Tikar is a Bantoid language of the Benue-Congo group spoken in Cameroon. The Tikar data in this paper was provided by Ellen Jackson. 5. See Karttunen (1971) for more discussion on implicative verbs.

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6. Jackson (personal communication) cited Tikar as an exception. According to Jackson, the Tikar reporter-speaker plays a partial role of the reported speaker in indirect speech, i.e. while the pronominalization is that of indirect speech, intonation and tense-aspect indicate direct speech. In the following example, the pronouns indicate indirect speech, but the question is posed with reported speaker intonation and question particle: ä sh£ Ιέ myiö 1ε Si §i yenä swum ss nü neemzi yi mbyi he say to his wife that they Quote saw thing that he sent them before-Q He said to his wife, have they (wife and children) seen what he sent them before?

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

This type of Tikar example posses a challenge to the traditional dichotomy of direct speech vs. indirect speech seen as two distinct categories where pronominalization serves as the diagnostic signal for category classification. Paez is a member of the Macro-Chibchan linguistic family of South America. Guajiro belongs to the Arawakan family. Its speakers live in the border region between Colombia and Venezuela. Guanano is a member of the Tucanoan family. Its speakers number fewer than 1000 in Colombia and Brazil. Cofan has about 600 speakers along the Ecuador-Colombia border in the eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains. It has been claimed to be a language isolate or a member of the Chibchan family. Borman (1977) remarked that Cofan exhibits Chibchan features as well as features of Western Tocanoan. The Andoke language is an isolate according to Witte (1977). It has less than one hundred speakers all living near the Caquetä River of Colombia. Cuiva is a Guahiban language of Colombia and Venezuela. Polanyi (1982) cites several other forms of reported speech. I will not delve into them here since they are beyond the scope of this study.

References Borman, Μ. B. 1977. Cofan Paragraph Structure and Function, in Discourse Grammar, Part 3, ed. by R. E. Longacre. pp. 289-338. Chafe, Wallace L. 1982. Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing and Oral Literature, in Spoken and Written Language, ed. by D. Tannen, pp. 35-44. Gerdel, Florence L. and M. C. Slocum. 1976. Paez Discourse, Paragraph and Sentence Structure, in Discourse Grammar, Part 1, ed. by R. E. Longacre. pp. 259-443. Givön, Talmy. 1980. The Binding Hierarchy and the Typology of Complements. Studies in Language, 4.3, pp. 333-377. Haiman, John and Sandra A. Thompson. 1984. 'Subordination' in Universal Grammar, in Proceedings from the 10th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Hopper, Paul and Sandra A. Thompson, (ed.) 1982. Studies in Transitivity. New York: Academic Press. Karttunen, Lauri. 1971. Implicative Verbs. Language, 47, pp. 340-58. Kerr, Isabel. 1977. The Centrality of Dialogue in Cuiva Discourse Structure, in Discourse Grammar, Part 3, ed. by R. E. Longacre. pp. 133-174.

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Kuno, Susumu. 1972. Pronominalization, Reflexivization, and Direct Discourse. Linguistic Inquiry, III.2, 161-196. Longacre, Robert E. 1976a. An Anatomy of Speech Notions. Lisse, Belgium: Peter de Ridder Press. Longacre Robert E., ed., 1976b. Discourse Grammar: Studies in Indigenous Languages of Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador, Part 1. Published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. Longacre, Robert E., ed., 1977. Discourse Grammar: Studies in Indigenous Languages of Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador, Part 3. Published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. Mansen, Richard and Karie. 1976. The Structure of Sentence and Paragraph in Guajiro Narrative Discourse, in Discourse Grammar Part 1, ed. by R. E. Longacre. pp. 147-258. Munro, Pamela. 1982. On the Transitivity of 'say' Verbs, in Studies in Transitivity, ed. by P. Hopper and S. A. Thompson, 1982. Partee, Barbara H. 1973. The Syntax and Semantics of Quotation, in A Festschrift for Morris Halle, ed. by P. Kiparsky and S. Anderson. New York: Holt, 410-18. Perrin, Mona. 1974. Direct and Indirect Speech in Mambila. Journal of Linguistics 10: 27-37. Polanyi, Livia. 1982. Literary Complexity in Everyday Storytelling, in Spoken and Written Language, ed. by D. Tannen, pp. 155-170. Thurgood, Graham. 1981. The Historical Development of the Akha Evidentials System, in Proceedings from the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 295-302. Waltz, Nathan E. 1976. Discourse Functions of Guanano Sentence and Paragraph, in Discourse Grammar, Part 1, ed. by R. E. Longacre. pp. 21-146. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1974. The Semantics of Direct and Indirect Discourse. Papers in Linguistics, 7:3/4, 267-307. Witte, Paul. 1977. Functions of the Andoke Copulative in Discourse and Sentence Structure, in Discourse Grammar, Part 3, ed. by R. E. Longacre. pp. 253-288.

Some remarks on direct and indirect discourse in Slave (Northern Athapaskan)* Keren D. Rice

Summary In the Athapaskan languages, three discourse types, direct discourse, indirect discourse, and quotation, have been distinguished (Schauber 1975, Rice 1983).1 Most complement-taking verbs require indirect discourse complements, a few occur with direct discourse complements, and a very small number can take direct quotation. The different discourse structures correspond to different points of view from which the complement is interpreted. Complements of direct discourse verbs are interpreted from the point of view of the subject of the direct discourse verb: first person refers to the subject of the direct discourse verb. Complements of indirect discourse verbs are interpreted from the point of view of the discourse speaker: first person decribes the speaker's situation, second person the hearer's situation, and third person the situation of others. Direct quotation is simply that: an evocation of the original speech situation. In this paper, I shall be concerned with the properties of indirect discourse and direct discourse determining verbs in Slave,2 a northern Athapaskan language. These discourse types are distinguished in a number of ways. First, there are differences in interpretation of pronouns in the complement sentence. Second, there are structural differences in complement type between direct and indirect discourse determining verbs. Finally, question movement can move question words out of complements of direct discourse verbs but not out of those of indirect discourse verbs. I will not attempt in this paper to look at the properties of Slave in terms of universal proposals of differences between discourse types; I will be concerned solely with describing the distinguishing characteristics of the discourse types in Slave. Section 1 is an overview of

* This research was funded by the Northern Social Research Division, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Ottawa, Canada. My deepest thanks to all of the Dene people who worked with me.

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the differences between discourse types, section 2 a discussion of pronoun use, section 3 presents structures, and section 4 syntax. The discussion in this paper is set within the extended standard theory model proposed by Chomsky (1981). The main relevance of this model to the paper is that I consider semantics (logical form) to be an interpretive component that assigns readings to syntactically wellformed strings. Any sentence that cannot be assigned an interpretation by the rules of logical form is filtered out.

1. An overview

An example of a verb which takes an indirect discourse complement is shown in (1). (1)

John ?erakie?ie wihsj gu kodihshc?3 parka l.sg. made comp 3.sg. know John knows that I made a parka.

In this sentence, the embedded sentence is interpreted from the point of view of the speaker of the entire sentence. This contrasts with sentence (2), which has a direct discourse determining verb as the matrix verb. (2)

Rosie ?erakie?ie wishj sedeyjdi parka l.sg. made 3.sg. told l.sg. Rosie ; told me that she; made a parka.

Here the complement is interpreted from the point of view of the subject of the direct discourse determining verb, 'tell.' This can be clearly shown by comparing the pronouns in the complement sentences. Both complements contain the verb wihsi Ί made.' In (1), with the indirect discourse determining verb, the subject of this verb is understood from the point of view of the speaker: the maker and the speaker are the same person. In (2), the subject of wihsi is understood from the point of view of the subject of the dominating verb; it is thus Rosie who made the parka. A further difference between indirect and direct discourse determining verbs is illustrated in (1) and (2). While indirect discourse determining verbs take complementizers, as illustrated by the presence of the complementizer gu. in (1), direct discourse determining verbs never take a complementizer. Another difference between indirect and direct discourse has to do

Direct and indirect discourse

in Slave

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with the location of prominent question words. With indirect discourse determining verbs, prominent question words always occur within the sentence with which they are logically associated, as in (3). (3a)

b)

beyighöne ke judone shptj gü ?akjhw? 3.parent Q when 3.sleep comp 3.pi make 3.sg When do hisj parents make hircij go to bed? * judone beyighöne ke shptj gu ?akjhw$

With direct discourse determining verbs, on the other hand, prominent question words can, and in fact usually do, occur outside the sentence with which they are logically associated. (4a)

b)

yenene judone ri Albert ghp beghärayuhdä sudeli nurse when PQM about l.sg will see 3.sg 3.sg want l.sg When does the nurse want to see me again about Albert? judöne ri yenene Albert ghp beghärayuhdä sudeli

With this brief overview of the differences between direct and indirect discourse, we can now go on to examine the characteristics of the discourse types in more detail.

2. Pronouns 2.1. Indirect discourse Most complement-taking verbs in Slave require indirect discourse complements. A few of the verbs are given in (5) below. All verbs are shown in the third person imperfective form. 4 (5)

-egodjhshp ?uweh?p goghahureht? -ghäyeda ?ekahededi -eradi -eguh?a

'he 'he 'he 'he 'he 'he 'he

knows' hears, listens' teaches' sees' says thus' remembers' finds'

These verbs fall into different semantic classes: There are verbs of perception, of saying, and of knowing. Several examples of the use of indirect discourse verbs are given below.

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(6)

judenj rähgwe kodjhshp yfle where l.sg live 3.sg know NEG He doesn't know where I live.

(7)

judenj dewpyä nj nenp ?ekähedewpdi 2.sg will go Comp 2.mother 2.sg say this You sg. tell your mother where you're going.

(8)

sü go were jp yidä keranedi Q before here l.sg sat 2.sg remember Do you sg. remember that I was here before?

(9)

raxets'? ?awodie kegodihshp l.pl to 3.sg will go l.sg know I know that he will come to us.

(10)

John hayi k'ähba m{ ?ah?t'e gu. begh