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Can supervaluationism successfully handle indirect speech reports? This chapter considers and rejects Schiffer's claim that they cannot. One alleged problem with indirect speech reports is that the truth of ‘Carla said that Bob is tall’ implausibly requires that Carla said all of a huge number of precise things (i.e. that Bob was over n feet tall, for values of n corresponding to precisifications of ‘tall’). This chapter shows why the supervaluationist is not committed to this. It argues that vague singular terms are no particular problem for supervaluationism within indirect speech reports, but there remain some issues surrounding certain vague demonstratives. The supervaluationist has good responses available, however, and any remaining questions face all theories of vagueness and are more appropriately addressed within a theory of demonstratives rather than a theory of vagueness.

This chapter argues that the notion of ‘context’ that has to be used in the study of indexicals is far from univocal. Several distinctions are made, including one between the context of the locutionary act and the context of the illocutionary act. As far as context-shifts are concerned, five types of case are distinguished. Certain features of the context can be shifted at will; others can be shifted through pretence. Two types of context-shifting pretence are distinguished, corresponding to the distinction between locutionary context and illocutionary context. In a fourth type of case, the expressions at issue are not really indexical, but perspectival, and their shifty behaviour raises no particular problem. Finally, the idea that in certain languages there are ‘shiftable indexicals’, interpretable with respect to the context of a reported speech or thought episode, is presented and discussed.

In Dutch inquisitorial courts police records play an important role. In most proceedings, witnesses are not heard again in court but instead a statement based on a question-answer interview at the police is used. Similarly, statements by suspects may take precedence over the oral statement they give in court. The immediacy principle, which requires witnesses’ and experts’ direct presentation of evidence has been weakened since the Supreme Court ruled that hearsay evidence may be used instead. Witnesses are rarely heard again in court and judges, instead, selectively read from their statements. Based on a corpus of 34 criminal trials, three broad linguistic strategies were found that invoke the content of police records: 1) summaries or paraphrases, 2) indirect reports, 3) direct reports. These different forms have different functions and this chapter investigates when, in what narrative and sequential context, and with what kind of information judges use what strategy and how. The chapter shows that referring to the case file is not a neutral activity and that different strategies allow a judge to put information more or less prominently ‘on record’ while constructing a new narrative of what happened.

Set in larger, persisting communicative situations, rhetorical discourse often features language attributed to other speakers and texts. Speaking for others was especially important in ancient forensic settings where witness testimony was reported secondhand. The methods described in this chapter for incorporating language from other sources follow those in Leech and Short's Style in Fiction. Other voices can be quoted directly, though always with selection and often with stylization, or they can be quoted indirectly. Indirect quotation invites paraphrase that can wander tendentiously from the original wording, and, as it appears in written texts, indirect quotations often include zones of ambiguous attribution. The words or near-words of others can also be abandoned in favor of reporting the speech act achieved by their words. Written texts may be represented using the same options of direct or indirect quotation, or the reporting of speech acts, each of these options increasing the interpretive control of another text. Speakers, of course, without the benefit of quotation marks, have to rely more on vocal dynamics to mark off another's words. The rhetorical manuals favored the dramatic mimicking of other voices (prosopopoeia), going so far as to recommend that the absent, the dead, and even inanimate entities be given a voice in a speech. Bakhtin noted the extremes of language mixtures as the heteroglossia that can result from the often unattributed incorporation of others’ language, even to the point of the double voicing of a single word. In a new media age of IM and blogs, such multivoicing has in fact become routine.

This chapter addresses several objections to contextualism, some of which have been prominent: objections from judgments of comparative content, and objections based on how ‘know(s)’ behaves within metalinguistic claims, belief reports, speech reports, and in connection with devices like ‘I never said that’. By comparing ‘know(s)’ with the behavior of clearly context-sensitive terms, and especially by focusing on the right sorts of cases — cases in which the contextualist really will hold that the content of ‘know(s)’ changes — it is shown that these objections all fail. Against the claim that the contextualist must make a lame and costly appeal to ‘semantic blindness’ to escape certain problems, it is shown that the way in which contextualism actually implicates speakers in such blindness does not hurt the view, because speakers are implicated in equally problematic semantic blindness whether or not contextualism is accepted.

Police interviewers must be cognizant of the needs of multiple audiences in relation to the talk that unfolds in the interview room. Simultaneously, they must negotiate an account which is both institutionally appropriate and fits the criteria set out by law on the one hand, and, according to current training models, is in the words of the interviewee on the other. Drawing on a small corpus of police interviews with rape victims, the chapter focuses on ‘formulation’ and ‘reported speech’ as reflexive speech devices through which interviewers orient to the absent audience, and as interactional resources they draw on to fix meaning and establish institutional salience. The chapter shows that reflexive language has the potential to be revealing not only of institutional priorities, but also of the ideological assumptions on which those priorities are based. The chapter further demonstrates that the types of reflexive language used may be problematic for interviewees to refute, in that the words, or force of the message, have been attributed to themselves. Given that rape victims often face criticism during cross examination based on inconsistencies between their statement and their testimony, this chapter demonstrates two of the means by which these supposed inconsistencies might arise.

This chapter discusses what can and cannot be said about the mental world of the mad or foolish through an examination of their writings and reported speech. It mentions that there is no behaviour which is intrinsically ‘mad’, so there are no words which are inherently ‘insane’.

This chapter deals with the combination of speech reporting verbs and “speech descriptors” in Late Modern English fictional texts, as in “ ‘Poor Aldous!’ said Lady Winterbourne, thoughtfully (CLMET3.0, Marcella, Period 3: 1894).” I demonstrate that, overall, the use of speech descriptors increases over time with most verbs and that most verbs combine with a broad range of descriptor types (especially in the form of adverb phrases). At the same time, complex interactions are evident among individual texts and verbs, where the verb SAY stands out, as does one text, Marcella. I suggest that some of the variability among the texts and verbs is due to the interaction between speech reporting and stylistic strategies of characterisation and theme development.

We start with a brief outline of kinds of clauses in Amazonian languages. We then turn to various techniques of putting clauses together into one sentence. Numerous Arawak, Carib and Tupí languages use nominalizations in the function of relative clauses, and in subordinate clauses. A number of languages north of the Amazon, and some in the south have what is known as ‘switch‐reference’: a clause‐combining technique which indicates whether the subject of the main clause is the same as that of a dependent clause, or different from it. This takes us to the issue of ‘pivot’ in clause combining. In a number of languages, including Aguaruna and the Quechua varieties, speech reports have many overtones to do with intention, internal thought and volition.

Every language has a way of speaking about how one knows what one says, and what one thinks about what one knows. In any language, there are ways of phrasing inferences, assumptions, probabilities and possibilities, and expressing disbelief. These epistemiological meanings and their cultural correlates are the subject matter of this chapter. We briefly revisit the relationship between evidentiality, that is, grammaticalized marking of information source, and information source, and attitudes to information, expressed through other linguistic means. Evidentials may have non-evidential extensions. Their use tends to reflect cultural norms and conventions. And their meanings may change as new techniques of acquiring information become available. The expression of knowledge and attitudes to it correlate with various cultural requirements, including the requirement to be explicit and precise, value of knowledge of different kind, and beliefs. Means of expressing knowledge are prone to diffusion in language contact. The last section of the chapter contains a brief outline of this volume.

This chapter examines Dickens’s use of shorthand as a law reporter at Doctors Commons, in the Gallery of Parliament and as a journalist. It describes the culture of reporting in each environment (section 5.1), particularly the notions of ‘faithful’ and ‘verbatim’ reporting (section 5.2). It also draws on Dickens’s Jarman v Bagster manuscript and a Mirror of Parliament report to assess his accuracy as a reporter (section 5.3). The chapter then addresses Dickens’s role as a court reporter in relation to his fiction. Drawing on Levinson’s ‘participation roles’ and Goffman’s ‘production format’, section 5.4 argues that the practice of shorthand reporting enabled Dickens to transcribe the words of unseen witnesses, plaintiffs, and defendants into the fictional words of unseen characters by developing his technical skill in reporting speech and his ability to manipulate ‘voicing’ to control readers’ vocalizations of his fictional work, particularly through variations in phonetic speech.

This chapter focuses on cases of consistency, across different testimonies of the same trial, in representing the ‘same’ discursive event using direct reported speech (DRS). This consistency emerged both in comparisons of testimonies of witnesses appearing for the same side in the trial and comparisons of testimonies of witnesses appearing for opposing sides. In all cases, DRS is used in correspondence with problematic elements of the version of facts the witness supports or counters, that is, with elements for which it is important to offer a persuasive representation. This result is compared with previous analyses of DRS in court that showed consistency in its use by legal professionals and in the absence of its use in witnesses’ discourse. The chapter demonstrates that witnesses and professionals share the discursive competence that brings them to choose to represent the important elements for supporting or countering the charge of using DRS.

Drawing on instant messaging (IM) conversations recorded between 2006 and 2009, this chapter analyzes American teenagers' normative assessments of peers' online practices. These assessments do not take the form of reflexively elaborated metadiscourses, but rather emerge through and within metacommunicative gossip, i.e., morally motivated stories about others' online communication. In particular, it concentrates on gossip conducted via IM about communication on the social networking site Facebook. Such gossip is not only metacommunicative; it is also metasemiotic insofar as participants incorporate materials from one media channel into another, drawing on evidence gathered by “stalking”, “lurking”, and “creeping” on Facebook to constitute moral assessments of others' online activity. This account shows that Facebook—an affectively charged arena of self-display and mutual scrutiny in which participants construct desire and build alliances through strategies of concealment and revelation—is a powerful catalyst for metacommunicative talk.

After an opening section surveying some possible alternative ways of employing semantic plasticity to handle the puzzles, this chapter discusses two challenges to the view developed in chapters 11 and 12. One involves the threat of rampant error in counterfactual speech reports. The second involves certain uncomfortable consequences of applying our favoured treatment of words like ‘that’ and ‘table’ to words like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘person’, ‘thinker’, and ‘conscious’. We show how considerations of semantic plasticity militate in the direction of a kind of “metaphysical misanthropy”, and explore its ethical ramifications.

This chapter focuses on the implicit and explicit ways that individuals navigate moral dilemmas and produce gendered and racialized identities. Analysis centers on the performance of a play, “Natasia’s Story,” a dramatic rendering of “a mother like us” for an audience of staff, children, and volunteers. This play was collaboratively created, produced, and performed by young women at Palomitáy. Holding the words of characters (in various scenes) in tension with the situation (a theatrical performance) shows how the unspoken assumptions and embedded dialogues of characters and performers are entangled with institutional configurations of power. Attention to the micro-politics of interactions illuminates young women’s sense of themselves as daughters (as well as mothers) and the simultaneous negotiation of moral dilemmas and social hierarchies.

This chapter addresses clause linking and complex clauses. A sentence consists of at least one main clause. The chapter starts with the coordination of two or more clauses of the same status. The chapter then turns to relative clauses, complement clauses, adverbial clauses, and chains of clauses connected through switch reference. Ellipsis and syntactic pivot are important principles in combining clauses. Sentences containing speech reports stand apart from the rest. The final section turns to other features of the sentence as a whole.

In this chapter, Alison Johnson focuses on intertextual construction in an English criminal case. Johnson reveals how the police interviews are used by barristers in the criminal trial of Dr Harold Shipman, who was tried and convicted (in a 58-day trial) in England in 1999/2000 of the murders of 15 of his patients and forging the will of one of them. The barristers use reported and indirect speech to shift between ‘teller’ and ‘knower’ to perform third-person judgement and evaluation and to position listeners, witnesses, texts and things as ‘objects’ in the courtroom. Johnson shows how objects from the storyworld of events and interviews and from another time and place are positioned in the current place, the courtroom, to be held, handled, viewed and heard. Embedded in the judicial field, the re-enacted and animated interview transcript becomes an evidential object for scrutiny and evaluation by the jury.

Chapter 4 focuses on the court interpreters and the institutional norms that govern their participation in court proceedings. A particular focus is the requirement to use direct translation—that is, speaking in the voice of the source speaker. Drawing on Goffman’s notion of footing and his participation framework model, the analysis shows that strict adherence to this rule prevents interpreters from identifying speaker and hearer roles when these cannot be inferred from the context. Expanding on earlier work, a quantitative analysis shows that some interpreters use reported speech when translating from English and thereby treat the speaker of a language other than English as their addressee, even when the source talk is addressed to someone else. These stylistic differences among interpreters correspond to differences in the understanding of their own role in relation to the other participants.

After being acquitted in a bribery trial, the US Congress believed (but couldn’t prove) that the evidence tapes in his case contained coded references to the bribery. I was asked to determine whether that their recorded language showed evidence of being coded. The speech event took the form of a progress report in which the speakers’ topics were consistent in their schemas about getting some reference letters supporting a mutual friend. However, the way they communicated their topics and responses, including excessive use of pause fillers, checks on confirmation of mutual understanding, missing follow-ups, and unusual anaphoric referencing, were key to the conclusion that the conversations indeed were conducted in a hastily constructed, partially disguised code. Hasting then was impeached and removed from the bench.