LAUSR

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 Bakhtin’s (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&N’s decision to stick with it seems sensible. A more serious problem (which is of course perennial in linguistic typology) is that it is difficult to draw a boundary around the range of phenomena to be included under the term. Everyone can agree on such central cases as (1) John said: “Look, there is marmalade here!”, but what about cases like (32) “He believes that there is no tooth fairy”, (33) “He sees that she is entering the room” and (34) “I am telling you that he is in for a surprise”. For those cases I take S&N’s position to be that there are no purely formal criteria for whether or not the sentences as such are to be counted as instances of RS. Rather, particular situated uses of them can be determined to be RS or otherwise, according to the three semantic criteria stipulated in their definition: “demonstratedness”, evidentiality and an evaluative epistemic relation between the represented utterance and its speaker. A paradoxical result of that way of determining the matter