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Direct and indirect speech
Journal of Pragmatics 13 (1989) 119-15! North-Holland
119
BOOK REVIEWS
Fiofian Couhnas, ed., Direct and indirect speech. (Trends in linguistics, Studies and monographs, 31.) Berlin" Mouton de Gruyter, 1986. ix+ 370pp. DM 145.00. Reviewed by Jane SIMPSON* This collection contains fourteen articles, describing methods of reporting speech in quite a wide variety of languages. Many interesting issues are raised, and the book has already become essential reading for people involved in this neglected area of language study. General discussions of direct and indirect speech are given in Coulmas's overview, 'Reported speech', as well as by Ayo Bamgbose, ('Reported speech in Yoruba'), Ivan Fonagy ('Reported speech in French and Hungarian'), Hartmut Haberland, ('Reported speech in Danish'), Charles Li ('Direct and indirect speech: A functional study'), David P.B. Massamba, ('Reported speech in Swahili'), and Deborah Tannen, ('Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and American conversational and litera~ narrative'). Perhaps the m.~st ,.'mport~nt gen_er~dinsight is that expressed by Coulmas in his introductory article, and exemplified by the material in many of the articles, namely, that there is no simple dichotomy between direct and indirect speech. Languages have a variety of viewpoints on reporting the speech ot thoughts of a person, which, in tam, may be expressed by a variety of grammatical and lexical means. Below, I discuss five important issues in reported speech that are raised in articles in the volume. (1) The expected degree of faithfulness to the form and content of the original speech/thought event. If a person uses direct speech in a conversation in English the hearer generally believes that the reporter is trying to reproduce, to the best of his/her ability, something that the person whose speech is being reported actually said or wrote. Hence that concern of politicians in English-speaking countries with 'quotes' and attribution of quotes, which is so often ridiculed in the BBC television show 'Yes, Prime Minister'. Correspondence address: J. Simpson, National Lexicography Project, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, GPO Box 553, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia. 0378-2166/89/$3.50 © 1989, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
120
Book reviews
However, several authors in this volume point out that direct speech is not always a faithful rendering of the speech/thought event. Haberland brings up useful examples showing that variables like 'such and such' occur even in grammatically marked direct speech, when they obviously were not actually part of the original utterance. Tannen goes a step further, and prefers to consider direct speech as 'constructed narrative', arguing for a closer relationship between reported speech and the dialogues created in fiction. However, ignoring the importance of our belief in the faithfulness of direct speech makes it less easy to understand the storm of protest when a former White House spokesman revealed that he had sometimes made up remarks which he had attributed to the President of the United States. (2) Whose perspective is the report made from? The perspective shift between reporter and reported event emerged in many papers as the ~,lta|d~,L~ll~tl~ "1". . . . , . . - . . ^ Ulllt~l~lll~/,~ .~:a-. . . . . . !. . . . direct . . and . . mu~rect Ol~tW~ll " . J ' -. . speecn,_ (Haberland, Karen Ebert, 'Reported speech in some languages in Nepal'). It is expressed by a variety of means including changes in honorifics, pronoun person, deictics of space and time, and tense and mood. (3) Is the truth of the content asserted? Kiefer ('Indirect ~peech in Hungarian') has a discussion c,f factive verbs in Hungarian, showing a split between verbs of emotion which are factive, and emotive verbs of saying, which are not. Another point on this topic is whether the speaker makes any comment about the authenticity of the information. 'Evidentiary', a term used by Li for the source of information, is a useful term to describe a number of devices illustrated in other papers in the volume for indicating the source of the information and the degree of reliability to be attached to that source. Examples include adverbials such as 'like this' (Cou~mas, 'Direct and indirect speech in Japanese'), or complementi~r~ that east doubt on what the original speaker said (Massamba), or particles indicating that the source is the reporter him/herself (B.G. Hewitt and S.R. Crisp, 'Speech reporting in the Caucasus'). (4) What comments can the reporter make on the manner of spe.&~g or the speech act, or on the speech situation? In English, one of the main ways of making such comments is by the choice of introducer verb. As Banfield (1973) points out, the range of verbs that can introduce direct and indirect speech differs. Some, such as 'query', may be used for direct speech, but cannot appear with 'that' complementisers, while others cannot be used in direct speech. And of course there is a difference between utterance-initial and utterance-final introducer verbs. Fonagy points out a difference among introducer verbs between primary report verbs (which are verbs whose meanings crucially involve verbal communication, suc.h, as speech act verbs), and secondary report verbs that only make reference to speech, and indicate that a non-verbal act is to be interpreted as a speech-act Speakers often use secondary introducer verbs to
Book reviews
121
comment on the speaker's state of mind ('guess') or feelings ('complain'). These sometimes spread into comments on the sound or manner ('titter, coo') or even gesture ('grimace'), since such words may often suggest the speaker's emotion, or even the emotion induced in the listener. Sometimes they are used, not as speech acts per se, but to indicate the place of the utterance in the discourse ('interrupt, repeat, continue'). Hunga.rian, as Fonagy shows, has an extraordina~,y rich array of possibilities for secondary introducer verbs, including facial and body gestures such as kicking, or social acts such as expelling someone. On this point too, several authors discuss how different kinds of speech acts are reported (Kerer~ D. Rice, 'Direct and indirect discourse in Slave', Massamba, Hewitt and Crisp). Bamgbose makes a useful distinction in Yoruba between two types of primary report verb. 'Neutral report verbs', such as 'say', can appear with complements in three moods" indicative, imperative and interrogative. 'Marked report verbs', expressing different types of speech act, such as swearing, condoling, assuring, have interesting semantic restrictions on the moods of the complements that they select. (5) The social and genre conventions of using reported speech. With the exception of comparisons between spoken and written conventions (in particular of quasi-direct discourse and 'style indirect libre'), this topic is not widely explored in the volume. However, an interesting point emerges from Tannen's article. She collected oral narratives by American and Greek women about being molested, and found that many of the Greek narratives involved reported speech, while in the American narratives there was only one ir tance of reported speech. She claims that 'constructed dialogue' (reported si ~eech) is a characteristic of Greek storytelling conventions. Given the vividness, immediacy and inherent drama of uire~:t' ............. : speech' t"'"wlerzoic~,a"' t""""l ~), taken up in this volume by Li), it is not surprising that direct speech should play such an important part in Greek storytelling. What is surprising is why it should play such a ~laall part in the American narratives. PerhAps this difference indicates a difference in Greek and American beliefs as '~J how faithful one must be to a speech/thought event in order to report it as direct speech (or perhaps Greek storytelling allows a greater suspension of the requirement of faithfulness in reporting than American story-telling does). Cultural differences of this type will undoubtedly provide fruitful topics for further study (see Rumsey (1988) for a discussion in these terms of the absence of a distinction between direct and indirect discourse in an Australian Aboriginal language, Ungarinyin). ~P
Other important questions addressed in the book include the correlates t,, direct and indirect discourse in both writing and speech (Fonagy, Karen H. Kvavik, 'Characteristics of direct and ren,~rt,~_n.~....,speech prosody" Evidence from Spanish').
122
Book reviews
A useful point made by Coulmas in his introduction, and Senko K. Maynard ('The particle -o and content-oriented indirect speech in Japanese written discourse') is that reported speech can be encoded by a wider range of constructions than is commonly supposed, including by reports of speech acts, such as 'They announced the victory'. As AIpher (1987) observes, recognising such constructions as indirect speech may redefine the debate over whether some languages lack a difference between direct and indirect speech. The book contains a wealth of information about different syntactic and lexical means of encoding reported speech, one of the more ~nteresting being the use of switch reference markers and fourth person pronouns to indicate perspective shifts (Ebert, Rice). However, with the exception perhaps of the two articles on Hungarian, we do not learn as much about the wealth and subtlety of the expression of direct and indirect speech in any language, as we do for English from Banfield (1973). This is partly because even the basic properties of the devices for reporting speech must be given for relatively unknown languages, but partly because many of the authors are not native speakers of the languages they describe, and are thus reaching into difficult and subtle areas of language. The main difficulty with the volume is the editing. Although Coulmas' ove_rview article provides a useful discussion of many of the important topics raised by papers in the volume, he makes very little reference to these papers, and likewise most of the authors do not refer to the other papers in the volume. This results in some redundancy, and also in disagreements that are not discussed, for example, as to whether or not inner speech is to be classed as indirect speech (Li, Rice). Then, although there is an index of subject~ an~ an index of names, r~either is particularly thorough, and the compilation o the index of subjects is exasperating (for example, separate entries for 'aria phora', 'anaphoric', 'anaphoric pronouns', 'anaphoric reference' and 'pronouns, anaphofic'). In the text, there are far too many typographical errors, including, regrettably, in example sentences. Several articles do not give: interlinear glosses, and, in some cases, leave material in other languages untranslated. But, these details aside, this i,~ a good book which should serve as a reference work and as a source of fruitful work for years to come. Refecences Alpher, Barry, 1987. 'Quoted and reported speech and related phenomena in Yir-Yoront'. Unpublished manuscript. Dept. of Lingu'.'gticg,University of Sydney. Banfield, Ann, 1973. Narrative style and the grammar of direct and indirect speech. Foundations of Language 10: 1-39. Rumsey, Alan, 1988. 'Wording, meaning and linguistic ideology'. Unpublished manuscript. Dept. of Anthropology, University of Sydney. Wierzbicka, Anna, 1974. The semantics of direct and indirect discourse. Papers in Linguistics 7 (3/ 4): 267-307.
119
BOOK REVIEWS
Fiofian Couhnas, ed., Direct and indirect speech. (Trends in linguistics, Studies and monographs, 31.) Berlin" Mouton de Gruyter, 1986. ix+ 370pp. DM 145.00. Reviewed by Jane SIMPSON* This collection contains fourteen articles, describing methods of reporting speech in quite a wide variety of languages. Many interesting issues are raised, and the book has already become essential reading for people involved in this neglected area of language study. General discussions of direct and indirect speech are given in Coulmas's overview, 'Reported speech', as well as by Ayo Bamgbose, ('Reported speech in Yoruba'), Ivan Fonagy ('Reported speech in French and Hungarian'), Hartmut Haberland, ('Reported speech in Danish'), Charles Li ('Direct and indirect speech: A functional study'), David P.B. Massamba, ('Reported speech in Swahili'), and Deborah Tannen, ('Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and American conversational and litera~ narrative'). Perhaps the m.~st ,.'mport~nt gen_er~dinsight is that expressed by Coulmas in his introductory article, and exemplified by the material in many of the articles, namely, that there is no simple dichotomy between direct and indirect speech. Languages have a variety of viewpoints on reporting the speech ot thoughts of a person, which, in tam, may be expressed by a variety of grammatical and lexical means. Below, I discuss five important issues in reported speech that are raised in articles in the volume. (1) The expected degree of faithfulness to the form and content of the original speech/thought event. If a person uses direct speech in a conversation in English the hearer generally believes that the reporter is trying to reproduce, to the best of his/her ability, something that the person whose speech is being reported actually said or wrote. Hence that concern of politicians in English-speaking countries with 'quotes' and attribution of quotes, which is so often ridiculed in the BBC television show 'Yes, Prime Minister'. Correspondence address: J. Simpson, National Lexicography Project, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, GPO Box 553, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia. 0378-2166/89/$3.50 © 1989, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
120
Book reviews
However, several authors in this volume point out that direct speech is not always a faithful rendering of the speech/thought event. Haberland brings up useful examples showing that variables like 'such and such' occur even in grammatically marked direct speech, when they obviously were not actually part of the original utterance. Tannen goes a step further, and prefers to consider direct speech as 'constructed narrative', arguing for a closer relationship between reported speech and the dialogues created in fiction. However, ignoring the importance of our belief in the faithfulness of direct speech makes it less easy to understand the storm of protest when a former White House spokesman revealed that he had sometimes made up remarks which he had attributed to the President of the United States. (2) Whose perspective is the report made from? The perspective shift between reporter and reported event emerged in many papers as the ~,lta|d~,L~ll~tl~ "1". . . . , . . - . . ^ Ulllt~l~lll~/,~ .~:a-. . . . . . !. . . . direct . . and . . mu~rect Ol~tW~ll " . J ' -. . speecn,_ (Haberland, Karen Ebert, 'Reported speech in some languages in Nepal'). It is expressed by a variety of means including changes in honorifics, pronoun person, deictics of space and time, and tense and mood. (3) Is the truth of the content asserted? Kiefer ('Indirect ~peech in Hungarian') has a discussion c,f factive verbs in Hungarian, showing a split between verbs of emotion which are factive, and emotive verbs of saying, which are not. Another point on this topic is whether the speaker makes any comment about the authenticity of the information. 'Evidentiary', a term used by Li for the source of information, is a useful term to describe a number of devices illustrated in other papers in the volume for indicating the source of the information and the degree of reliability to be attached to that source. Examples include adverbials such as 'like this' (Cou~mas, 'Direct and indirect speech in Japanese'), or complementi~r~ that east doubt on what the original speaker said (Massamba), or particles indicating that the source is the reporter him/herself (B.G. Hewitt and S.R. Crisp, 'Speech reporting in the Caucasus'). (4) What comments can the reporter make on the manner of spe.&~g or the speech act, or on the speech situation? In English, one of the main ways of making such comments is by the choice of introducer verb. As Banfield (1973) points out, the range of verbs that can introduce direct and indirect speech differs. Some, such as 'query', may be used for direct speech, but cannot appear with 'that' complementisers, while others cannot be used in direct speech. And of course there is a difference between utterance-initial and utterance-final introducer verbs. Fonagy points out a difference among introducer verbs between primary report verbs (which are verbs whose meanings crucially involve verbal communication, suc.h, as speech act verbs), and secondary report verbs that only make reference to speech, and indicate that a non-verbal act is to be interpreted as a speech-act Speakers often use secondary introducer verbs to
Book reviews
121
comment on the speaker's state of mind ('guess') or feelings ('complain'). These sometimes spread into comments on the sound or manner ('titter, coo') or even gesture ('grimace'), since such words may often suggest the speaker's emotion, or even the emotion induced in the listener. Sometimes they are used, not as speech acts per se, but to indicate the place of the utterance in the discourse ('interrupt, repeat, continue'). Hunga.rian, as Fonagy shows, has an extraordina~,y rich array of possibilities for secondary introducer verbs, including facial and body gestures such as kicking, or social acts such as expelling someone. On this point too, several authors discuss how different kinds of speech acts are reported (Kerer~ D. Rice, 'Direct and indirect discourse in Slave', Massamba, Hewitt and Crisp). Bamgbose makes a useful distinction in Yoruba between two types of primary report verb. 'Neutral report verbs', such as 'say', can appear with complements in three moods" indicative, imperative and interrogative. 'Marked report verbs', expressing different types of speech act, such as swearing, condoling, assuring, have interesting semantic restrictions on the moods of the complements that they select. (5) The social and genre conventions of using reported speech. With the exception of comparisons between spoken and written conventions (in particular of quasi-direct discourse and 'style indirect libre'), this topic is not widely explored in the volume. However, an interesting point emerges from Tannen's article. She collected oral narratives by American and Greek women about being molested, and found that many of the Greek narratives involved reported speech, while in the American narratives there was only one ir tance of reported speech. She claims that 'constructed dialogue' (reported si ~eech) is a characteristic of Greek storytelling conventions. Given the vividness, immediacy and inherent drama of uire~:t' ............. : speech' t"'"wlerzoic~,a"' t""""l ~), taken up in this volume by Li), it is not surprising that direct speech should play such an important part in Greek storytelling. What is surprising is why it should play such a ~laall part in the American narratives. PerhAps this difference indicates a difference in Greek and American beliefs as '~J how faithful one must be to a speech/thought event in order to report it as direct speech (or perhaps Greek storytelling allows a greater suspension of the requirement of faithfulness in reporting than American story-telling does). Cultural differences of this type will undoubtedly provide fruitful topics for further study (see Rumsey (1988) for a discussion in these terms of the absence of a distinction between direct and indirect discourse in an Australian Aboriginal language, Ungarinyin). ~P
Other important questions addressed in the book include the correlates t,, direct and indirect discourse in both writing and speech (Fonagy, Karen H. Kvavik, 'Characteristics of direct and ren,~rt,~_n.~....,speech prosody" Evidence from Spanish').
122
Book reviews
A useful point made by Coulmas in his introduction, and Senko K. Maynard ('The particle -o and content-oriented indirect speech in Japanese written discourse') is that reported speech can be encoded by a wider range of constructions than is commonly supposed, including by reports of speech acts, such as 'They announced the victory'. As AIpher (1987) observes, recognising such constructions as indirect speech may redefine the debate over whether some languages lack a difference between direct and indirect speech. The book contains a wealth of information about different syntactic and lexical means of encoding reported speech, one of the more ~nteresting being the use of switch reference markers and fourth person pronouns to indicate perspective shifts (Ebert, Rice). However, with the exception perhaps of the two articles on Hungarian, we do not learn as much about the wealth and subtlety of the expression of direct and indirect speech in any language, as we do for English from Banfield (1973). This is partly because even the basic properties of the devices for reporting speech must be given for relatively unknown languages, but partly because many of the authors are not native speakers of the languages they describe, and are thus reaching into difficult and subtle areas of language. The main difficulty with the volume is the editing. Although Coulmas' ove_rview article provides a useful discussion of many of the important topics raised by papers in the volume, he makes very little reference to these papers, and likewise most of the authors do not refer to the other papers in the volume. This results in some redundancy, and also in disagreements that are not discussed, for example, as to whether or not inner speech is to be classed as indirect speech (Li, Rice). Then, although there is an index of subject~ an~ an index of names, r~either is particularly thorough, and the compilation o the index of subjects is exasperating (for example, separate entries for 'aria phora', 'anaphoric', 'anaphoric pronouns', 'anaphoric reference' and 'pronouns, anaphofic'). In the text, there are far too many typographical errors, including, regrettably, in example sentences. Several articles do not give: interlinear glosses, and, in some cases, leave material in other languages untranslated. But, these details aside, this i,~ a good book which should serve as a reference work and as a source of fruitful work for years to come. Refecences Alpher, Barry, 1987. 'Quoted and reported speech and related phenomena in Yir-Yoront'. Unpublished manuscript. Dept. of Lingu'.'gticg,University of Sydney. Banfield, Ann, 1973. Narrative style and the grammar of direct and indirect speech. Foundations of Language 10: 1-39. Rumsey, Alan, 1988. 'Wording, meaning and linguistic ideology'. Unpublished manuscript. Dept. of Anthropology, University of Sydney. Wierzbicka, Anna, 1974. The semantics of direct and indirect discourse. Papers in Linguistics 7 (3/ 4): 267-307.