Response to Spronck and Nikitina "reported speech forms a dedicated syntactic domain"

Alan Rumsey*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

    1 Citation (Scopus)

    Abstract

    I am grateful for the chance to respond to this interesting and valuable study. The ubiquity of reported speech constructions in human languages is a remarkable fact about them, bearing out Bakhtins (1984: 143) dictum that that we live in a world of others words. But despite its ubiquity and functional distinctiveness, as Spronck and Nikitina (S&N) show us, the category of reported speech (RS) is harder to pin down than we might think. First of all there are problems with the term itself, given that what RS reports may include thought as well as speech, and even when it is (re)presented as speech, may not ever have actually been spoken. Notwithstanding those problems with the term reported speech, in practice it seems that the range of phenomena to which it has applied do match up closely with those referred to by alternative terms such as reported discourse, represented speech, and constructed dialogue. Given that, and the fact that reported speech is the most commonly used term for it nowadays, S&Ns decision to stick with it seems sensible.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)237-244
    Number of pages8
    JournalLinguistic Typology
    Volume23
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2019

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