Indirect reporting and footing

pp. 99-119

in: Alessandro Capone, The pragmatics of indirect reports, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

In this paper I shall deal with indirect reporting as part of pragmatic competence. In particular, I will show that pragmatic competence certainly includes the notion of footing, first of all because discussion of the pragmatic competence involved in indirect reporting certainly requires analysis of the notion of footing; second, because there can be no pragmatic competence, without the notion of footing, as part of our pragmatic competence is to know how to segment discourse and how to recognize transition points between structurally different types of discourse in which the speaker takes a different stance to herself or the persona she speaks for (sometimes signaling that she does not speak for herself but for a different persona, as happens in the case of acting at the theatre). I take pragmatic competence to be knowledge of the conditions of appropriate use, following a venerable tradition dating back to Hymes (1974) and Gumperz (1982) and culminating with Kecskes (2014, 62).