Reported Discourse

The present volume unites 15 papers on reported discourse from a wide genetic and geographical variety of languages. Besides the treatment of traditional problems of reported discourse like the classification of its intermediate categories, the book reflects in particular how its grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic properties have repercussions in other linguistic domains like tense-aspect-modality, evidentiality, reference tracking and pronominal categories, and the grammaticalization history of quotative constructions.
Almost all papers present a major shift away from analyzing reported discourse with the help of abstract transformational principles toward embedding it in functional and pragmatic aspects of language.
Another central methodological approach pervading this collection consists in the discourse-oriented examination of reported discourse based on large corpora of spoken or written texts which is increasingly replacing analyses of constructed de-contextualized utterances prevalent in many earlier treatments.
The book closes with a comprehensive bibliography on reported discourse of about 1.000 entries.

Bernard Comrie, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig:
The study of reported speech has a venerable history in linguistic and related disciplines: exercises in oratio obliqua were part of the training of every student of Latin and Greek from Antiquity, philosophers have long puzzled over the de re / de dicto distinction, and literary scholars have pondered over such apparent self-contradictions as style indirect libre. But it is probably true to say that reported speech in general has not played a major role in recent linguistic theory. This collective monograph promises to correct this situation. Its contributions address critical descriptive and theoretical issues in a wide range of languages, both geographically (from western Europe and the Caucasus to the South Pacific) and chronologically (from Ancient Egyptian to the present day). The phenomenon of reported speech is located firmly in its functional and pragmatic context, without losing sight of the importance of its formal characteristics in different languages. The contributions are important not only for the insight they provide into indirect discourse as such, but for their relevance to such crucial areas in contemporary linguistic theory as deixis (both pronominal and temporal), reference-tracking (including logophoric reference, a concept that has only within the last couple of decades made its way into general linguistic theory), and grammaticalization (in particular of quotative constructions). The richness of the empirical material and the insightfulness of the theoretical discussion will appeal to linguists with interests ranging from syntax to pragmatics, from descriptive to historical linguistics, from typology to discourse structure.