This volume offers the reader a singular overview of current thinking on indirect reports. The
contributors are eminent researchers from the fields of philosophy of language theoretical
linguistics and communication theory who answer questions on this important issue. This
exciting area of controversy has until now mostly been treated from the viewpoint of
philosophy. This volume adds the views from semantics conversation analysis and
sociolinguistics. Authors address matters such as the issue of semantic minimalism vs. radical
contextualism the attribution of responsibility for the modes of presentation associated with
Noun Phrases and how to distinguish the indirect reporter¿s responsibility from the original
speaker¿s responsibility. They also explore the connection between indirect reporting and
direct quoting. Clearly indirect reporting has some bearing on the semantics pragmatics debate
however there is much controversy on ¿what is said¿ whether this is a minimal semantic
logical form (enriched by saturating pronominals) or a much richer and fully contextualized
logical form. This issue will be discussed from several angles. Many of the authors are
contextualists and the discussion brings out the need to take context into account when one
deals with indirect reports both the context of the original utterance and the context of the
report. It is interesting to see how rich cues and clues can radically transform the reported
message assigning illocutionary force and how they can be mobilized to distinguish several
voices in the utterance. Decoupling the voice of the reporting speaker from that of the
reported speaker on the basis of rich contextual clues is an important issue that pragmatic
theory has to tackle. Articles on the issue of slurs will bring new light to the issue of
decoupling responsibility in indirect reporting while others are theoretically oriented and
deal with deep problems in philosophy and epistemology.
