"The book is of great interest, both to those who deal with pragmatics and to those who deal with philosophy of language and cognitive Sciences. We recommend the book to both students and researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics and socio-pragmatics. ... Summing up, Capone's book is a highly interesting essay on indirect report, and I strongly recommend his book." (Caterina Scianna, Pragmatics and Society, Vol. 10 (3), 2019)
"The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports casts new light on the notoriously difficult issue of indirect reports. ... This book is excellent and thought-provoking ... The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports is a timely and welcome contribution, and will be of great interest not only to scholars working in the field of pragmatics, but also to those interested in the philosophy of language. ... a useful and substantial volume, which will also inspire future researchers to undertake further explorations on this subject." (Vahid Parvaresh, Australian Journal of Linguistics, May, 2017)
"The fourteen chapters of the book provide a logical and thorough source of information on indirect reports. The author provides many examples in every chapter and gives the interested researchers a good incentive to read and understand the concepts discussed. ... a valuable source for graduate and undergraduate students, their instructors, and researchers. The book is recommended to all those who are interested in pragmatics, linguistics, syntax, and also to those who wish to do further research in the area." (Azizeh Chalak, International Journal of Language Studies, Vol. 11 (1), January, 2017)
"The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports is not only a theoretical playground in which different theories are confronted, discussed, and deeply investigated. ... it is an extremely valuable reference for studying and investigating reports and more generally interpretive problems. ... The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports is an original work for scholars working in different disciplines, on a subject that is at the same time philosophically crucial, socially important, and almost neglected in philosophy and linguistics." (Fabrizio Macagno, Intercultural Pragmatics, Vol. 14 (2), 2017)
"This monograph greatly benefits from the truly interdisciplinary perspective that the author adopts on the broadly defined phenomenon of indirect reporting, illustrating both its cognitive and its communicative dimension. ... should be compulsory reading both for those who are in need of a first thorough introduction to the variegated domain of indirect reporting and for those who are in need of an in-depth discussion of the many complexities that arise in this domain and that deserve a serious interdisciplinary treatment." (Denis Delfitto and Gaetano Fiorin, Journal of Linguistics, 2017)
Preface.- Acknowledgements.- Putting the threads together.- On the social practice of indirect reports.- On the (complicated) relationship between direct and indirect reports.- Indirect reports as language games.- Indirect reports and footing.- Reporting non-serious speech.- Indirect reports and slurring.- Indirectly reporting and translating slurring utterances.- Belief reports and pragmatic intrusion (the case of null appositives).- The pragmatics of attitudes ‘de se’.- Consequences of the pragmatics of ‘de se’.- Impure ‘de se’ thoughts and pragmatics (and how this is relevant to pragmatics and IEM).- Attributions of propositional attitude and pragmatic intrusion.- Simple sentences, substitution and embedding explicatures (the case of implicit indirect reports).- General Conclusion
This monograph on indirect reports offers insights on the semantics/pragmatics interface and a refinement of the notion of explicature. The volume is written in an engaging style and guides the reader through the theoretical problems and their ramifications. The thorniest problem in the study of indirect reports is their polyphonic nature, and how the listener distinguishes between the reporter’s voice and the original speaker’s voice, either by contextual clues or, in the absence of such clues, by resorting to pragmatic principles.
The introductory chapter discusses the main issues that will be addressed in the volume. The next chapters focus on the various aspects of indirect reports, covering both theory and practical applications.