Resumen de Metalanguage and subjectivity in indirect reports
Mostafa Morady Moghaddam, Alessandro Capone
Indirect reporting is a complicated language game which is influenced by social, philosophical and linguistic idiosyncrasies (for example, issues such as power relations, sense and reference, evidentials, opacity, etc.). Invariably, there has been some controversy over how much freedom the indirect reporter is permitted when reporting original utterances. In this regard, some authors (e.g. Capone, 2018) support pragmatic opacity where a certain degree of flexibility and variability is warranted depending on the context of the utterance. In this study, we analyse Persian and English sentences to demonstrate how, in indirect reporting, reporters can manipulate the original utterances. Previous research (e.g. Nodoushan, 2018) has revealed that Persian reported speech does not allow linguistic manipulation. This study attempts to show that Persian reporters, just like English speakers, are able to indicate their divergence from the original utterances in indirect reporting. The metalanguage comments in the Persian indirect reports highlighted situations where reporters monitored (i.e. self-regulated) themselves by changing the verbs of saying (e.g. ‘said’, ‘claimed’, etc.), assessing the appropriateness of the discourse and communicating uncertainty. We also discuss a number of examples where there was disagreement in the Persian indirect reports (the original speakers did not accept the report to be genuine) because the practice of samesaying (similarity of content) was not being strictly adhered to. We conclude that indirect reports allow for several forms of manipulation for different purposes, whereby the reporter can make use of syntactic strategies to monitor the discourse (i.e. manipulating the original utterance). Moreover, reports can sometimes be influenced by interpreted information (which may be incorrect) which can cast doubt on fair paraphrasing and the practice of samesaying.
