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A Logically Transparent Approach to Discourse Reporting
Author(s) -
Washington Corey,
Biro John
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0017.00163
Subject(s) - utterance , complement (music) , sentence , set (abstract data type) , linguistics , epistemology , feature (linguistics) , point (geometry) , computer science , philosophy , mathematics , biochemistry , chemistry , geometry , complementation , programming language , gene , phenotype
In this essay we develop a theory of discourse reports. The theory provides a common set of structural and interpretive principles that together account for the truth conditions of direct, indirect and mixed reports. A distinguishing feature of our view is the assumption that the complement sentence of a report divides exclusively and exhaustively into regions that characterize the content of the reported utterance and regions that characterize the form of the utterance. This assumption implies that mixed reports do not imply full direct or indirect reports. We discuss a classical David‐sonian proposal by Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore which conflicts with our theory on this latter point and show that it is unable to account for many of the phenomena we discuss.