ABSTRACT
The standard description of indirect discourse posits that in indirect discourse the speaker’s (reporter’s) deictic point of view is asserted over and against any deictic orientation within the presupposed reported discourse. A radical version of this view can be observed in Banfield’s absolute denial of any character (reportee)-oriented deixis in indirect speech. The most obvious sign of the well-known alignment of (free) indirect discourse with the reporter’s deixis consists in the referential reorientation, which is obligatory for both indirect and free indirect discourse and can easily be observed in the referential shift of pronominals and R-expressions.1 We will discuss this phenomenon under (3.2) below. Not all designations in indirect discourse, however, necessarily derive from the speaker’s perspective. As we already noted under (1.2), there would be no problem with the de re and de dicto readings of indirect discourse sentences if the speaker’s deictic perspective was not in fact susceptible to the reportee’s intensional meanings and designations. Referential reorientations by the reporter towards the reportee’s deictic centre are therefore treated in a separate section under (3.4.) below. They constitute one category of the many ‘expressive’ elements attributable to the reported speech act.
