Reported Discourse: A Meeting Ground for Different Linguistic Domains (review)

This collection contains fifteen papers and a comprehensive bibliography on reported discourse within a linguistic framework, as well as indices of names and languages. The papers are divided into four groups. Part 1 deals primarily with issues of the classification of reported discourse. While more recent linguistic works on reported speech often accept that the traditional binary distinction between direct and indirect speech is insufficient to capture what languages actually do, these six papers clearly show the range of options for reporting discourse in genetically and typologically diverse languages and why the traditional binary division is inadequate.

Winfried Boeder’s ‘Speech and thought representation in the Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages’ focuses on Old Georgian, Modern Georgian, and Svan, and shows that different features, such as person, tense, and local and temporal expressions, may ‘shift’ in reported discourse. It becomes clear that a division between direct and indirect speech is not sufficient to account for the morphosyntactic possibilities, a theme that continues throughout the volume.

Andrea Golato’s paper, ‘Self-quotation in German: Reporting on past decisions’, brings forth another theme, namely that even in a linguistic analysis of reported speech we must look beyond the morphosyntax and examine constructions in their discourse contexts.

The remaining papers in Part 1 look at similar issues that arise in a range of other languages: ‘Direct and indirect speech in Cerma narrative’ by Ivan Lowe and Ruth Hurlimann; ‘Direct and indirect discourse in Tamil’ by Sanford B. Steever; ‘The acceptance of “free indirect discourse”: A change in the representation of thought in Japanese’ by Yasushi Suzuki; and ‘Direct, indirect and other discourse in Bengali newspapers’ by Wim van der Wurff.

The two papers in Part 2—Gerda Haßler’s ‘Evidentiality and reported speech in Romance languages’ and Tomoko I. Sakita’s ‘Discourse perspectives on tense choice in spoken-English reporting discourse’—attempt to account for the range of ‘shift’ phenomena found in these languages using ideas such as evidentiality and point of view.

In Part 3, Christopher Culy focuses on the use of logophoric marking with different matrix predicate types in ‘The logophoric hierarchy and variation in Dogon’, and Yan Huang’s ‘Logophoric marking in East Asian languages’ looks at Chinese, Japanese, and Korean long-distance reflexive use and attempts to account for their use in a neo-Gricean pragmatic framework.

The five papers in Part 4 examine quotative constructions in a range of languages, focusing in particular on development and change over time. Many take up issues of grammaticalization of quotatives, complementizers, and the verbs ‘say’ and ‘do’, such as: ‘The grammaticalization of “say” and “do”: An areal phenomenon in East Africa’ by David Cohen, Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle, and Martine Vanhove; ‘When ‘“say” is not say: The functional versatility of the Bantu quotative marker ti with special reference to Shona’ by Tom Güldemann; ‘“Report” constructions in Kambera (Austronesian)’ by Marian A. F. Klamer; and ‘All the same? The emergence of complementizers in Bislama’ by Miriam Meyerhoff. One general conclusion is that the development of verbs of speech into quotatives is by no means the only path of development, with verbs of speech developing into other grammatical elements, and quotatives and complementizers developing from different sources. Frank Kammerzell and Carten Peust’s ‘Reported speech in Egyptian: Forms, types and history’ follows the (often radical) changes in reported speech in Egyptian over time. While all of the papers in this part have slightly different foci, they each demonstrate the problem of treating reported discourse as direct versus indirect speech.

I believe that this book will become a central reference for any descriptive or...