Indirect reports as semantic-pragmatic games

Abstract

This paper examines indirect reports from the lens of socio-cognitive approach (SCA) to pragmatics. Indirect reports have the capacity to re-mold the substance of the original utterance as a whole. In direct reporting, the original utterance is produced in an actual situational context, and then, it is being reported by a different speaker in a new situational context. So, the utterance which was initially produced is only interpretable in the light of the common ground A whereas the reported utterance is only interpretable in the light of common ground B. We have it from Kecskes (2013. Intercultural pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press: 159) that “common ground is both an a priori existing and a cooperatively constructed mental abstraction. Likewise, the main condition of reporting is the need of the hearer: there would be no need for reported speech if the audience were already aware of the content of the report. For that reason, the process of meaning making in reporting, that is, the transmission and simultaneously creation of meaning is inextricably bound with the question of context, salience, common ground, pragmatics, semantics and syntax, not to mention all those bodily gestures and expressions that can, or more importantly, cannot be registered in language.