ABSTRACT
This is a chapter of contexts philosophical, linguistic, literary and narratological. Speech and thought representation has been an issue of central concern for a variety of very different disciplines, and an issue that was discussed under a number of titles specific to the concerns of those disciplines. The survey presented here is designed to locate phenomena of quoting and reporting in their multiple interdisciplinary perspectives and to demonstrate why they became such a problem within so many separate paradigms. The following presentation additionally aims at providing a frame of reference for the chapters that follow. On the one hand, the philosophical discussion constitutes a kind of cas limite of the problems of reported discourse-it, for instance, helps to explain some of the preoccupations of studies on indirect discourse by linguists such as Barbara Hall Partee (1973b, 1984) and other contributors of Linguistics and Philosophy (Dowty 1982,1986; F.Heny 1981a, 1982; B.Richards 1981,1982; P.Peterson 1982; Wreen 1989). Like deixis, the topics of speech representation and intensional logics have acquired a central, potentially disruptive relevance as truth-semantically marginal issues that are threatening to undermine the general applicability of truth semantics. For the present book, this philosophical perspective constitutes a horizon of my own inquiry, which centres on more linguistic and literary concerns. The philosophical perspective is so important because of its influence on several more narrowly relevant philosophical and linguistic studies which grew out of questions originally conceived within philosophy. Thus Castañeda’s seminal work on consciousness and the self (Castañeda 1966, 1967a, 1967b, 1968) needs to be situated within a debate between philosophers of truth semantics.1 Likewise, speech act theory, a philosophical discipline in its origins, developed directly from the insufficiencies of the truth-value analysis of what Austin then called ‘performative’ utterances. Even more specifically, the linguistic issue of deixis poses some crucial philosophical problems, and it is interesting to observe how, for instance, Jakobson departs from Peirce’s remarks on Russell’s ego-centric particulars (Jakobson 1956/1971). The philosophical debate about deixis and naming between Frege, Russell, Peirce, Strawson, Kripke, Quine, Putnam and others is regularly invoked by standard linguistic studies of deixis, as already by Bühler or Benveniste.
