ERC Project BLENDS (2011-2016)
News
- Project officially ends Aug 31, 2016.
- I taught an intro course at ESSLLI 2016 about quotation where I touched on all the key findings of the project.
- Two recent papers that bring together the results of the various subprojects on sign language, child language and ancient Greek: The pragmatics of attraction: explaining unquotation in direct and free indirect discourse and A plea against monsters.
- Franziska Köder successfully defended her PhD thesis Between direct and indirect speech: The acquisition of pronouns in reported speech on Thursday, February 18, 2016 at 16:15.
- On February 19, 2016 we had a workshop related to Franziska's defense.
- Workshop, co-organized with Corien Bary: Backgrounded Reports, January 15, 2016, Nijmegen.
- Organized a workshop together with Jennifer Spenader in Groningen, March 19-20, 2015: Redrawing Pragmasemantic Borders
- ... and one together with Lotte Hogeweg in Nijmegen, January 22-23, 2015. Formal Semantics Meets Cognitive Semantics
- New website of Gesellschaft für Semantik and Sinn und Bedeutung
- We organized a conference "(Re)presenting the Speech of Others" in Groningen, March 13-14, 2014
- Homepage of Franziska Köder
- Markus Werning and I organized a workshop "Quotation: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives" in Bochum, Sept 27--29, 2012 http://www.rub.de/phil-lang/quotation.html
- PhD student Franziska Köder joined the project September 1, 2011. She's working on children's acquisition of the direct/indirect distinction.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 263890-BLENDS.
Between direct and indirect discourse
Shifting perspective in blended discourse
A fundamental feature of language is that it allows us to reproduce what others have said. It is traditionally assumed that there are two ways of doing this: direct discourse, where you preserve the original speech act verbatim, and indirect discourse, where you paraphrase it in your own words. In accordance with this dichotomy, linguists have posited a number of universal characteristics to distinguish the two modes. At the same time, we are seeing more and more examples that seem to fall somewhere in between. I reject the direct–indirect distinction and replace it with a new paradigm of blended discourse.
Combining insights from philosophy and linguistics, my framework has only one kind of speech reporting, in which a speaker always attempts to convey the content of the reported words from her own perspective, but can quote certain parts verbatim, thereby effectively switching to the reported perspective. To explain why some languages are ‘shiftier’ than others, I hypothesize that a greater distance from face-to-face communication, with the possibility of extra- and paralinguistic perspective marking, necessitated the introduction of an artificial direct–indirect separation. I test this hypothesis by investigating languages that are closely tied to direct communication: Dutch child language, as recent studies hint at a very late acquisition of the direct–indirect distinction; Dutch Sign Language, which has a special role shift marker that bears a striking resemblance to the quotational shift of blended discourse; and Ancient Greek, where philologists have long been ob
serving perspective shifts.
In sum, my research combines a new philosophical insight on the nature of reported speech with formal semantic rigor and linguistic data from child language experiments, native signers, and Greek philology.
Nederlandse samenvatting:
Een belangrijk aspect van het menselijk taalvermogen is dat het de mogelijkheid biedt om andermans woorden of gedachten weer te geven. Redeweergave constructies (Piet zei dat hij ziek was) spelen bijvoorbeeld een cruciale rol in debatten over het fundamentele verschil tussen mensen- en dierentaal, en over hoe jonge kinderen het vermogen ontwikkelen om zich in het gedachteleven van een ander te verplaatsen. Op school leer je dat er twee manieren zijn om andermans woorden weer te geven: direct (hij zegt: "jij bent geniaal") en indirect (hij zegt dat ik geniaal ben). Maar hoe hard is deze tweedeling? Ik onderzoek met name het grijze gebied tussen directe en indirecte rede, in kindertaal, gebarentaal en Oudgrieks.
