Reports of Specific Indefinites

A (contingent) content–parthood analysis of indirect speech reports

“…Almost all of those who have recognized that the content of the complement of a speech (or attitude) report does not have to be the content of the speech (or attitude) reported propose that a content γ can be reported in context c' as having been said by a person who has uttered a sentence σ in context c (or alternatively, as being the object of that person's attitude), if γ is entailed by the conjunction of the content of σ in c and some further information supplied by c 0 : That is, if γ is contextually entailed by the content of σ in c (see Bach, 1997;Blumberg & Lederman, 2021;Bowker, 2019;Brasoveanu & Farkas, 2007;Graff Fara, 2003 andSaebø, 2013). But since such proposals will make entailment sufficient for the correctness of a report, no such proposal can be successful, at least when applied to speech reports: So applied, they will wrongly predict that someone can be said to have said a disjunction which has what they said as a disjunct.…”

On the exceptionality of reported speech

“…(Cuzco Quechua, Faller 2002:3) Semantically, the unifying characteristic of evidentiality is that it is a way of specifying what evidence one has for a specific claim, in a such a way that this evidence information is 'backgrounded'. In current terminology, the at-issue contribution of (3) is that it is raining, and the not-at-issue contribution is that the speaker has either direct perceptual or indirect hearsay evidence for this (Murray 2017). Summing up, on the traditional picture there is no category of reported speech, but a cluster of distinct phenomena that can be used for various things, including but not limited to reporting what someone said.…”

Fictional Names in Psychologistic Semantics

“…(2009) analysis of polar questions in terms of a fine-grained discourse model; Saebø's (2012) analysis of specific indefinites as referential for the speaker but existential for the hearer; Wechsler's (2010) analysis of plural pronominal paradigms in terms of speaker-hearer asymmetries in communicating de se attitudes; and Cohen & Krifka's (2014) analysis of superlative quantifiers using a model of complex commitment spaces.…”