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 Davidsonian 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.We believe that the goal of a semantic theory of discourse reports should be to provide a unified account of the semantic properties of the full range of well-formed utterances of the form in (1): 1. A said (that) X. Most discussions in the literature have focused on direct and indirect reports like (2a) and (2b): 2a. Alice said (that) Nicole and Susan are pharmacists. 2b. Alice said (,) 'Nicole and Susan are pharmacists'. 1Direct and indirect reports are at the extremes of a full range of report grades, which also includes mixed reports like:2c. Alice said (that) Nicole and Susan are 'pharmacists'.We appreciate the helpful criticisms and suggestions of the referees for Mind and Language, as well as those of Paul Pietroski. 1 Throughout the paper, we focus on spoken reports. There are somewhat stricter constraints on acceptability in written language. For example, in reports lacking a complementizer, written English conventionally requires a comma after 'said.' We do not think that this signifies any logical or semantic difference between spoken and written reports.
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