Abstract

The present work explores the interpretation of indirect reports such as “John said that his brother is a genius” in relation to the propositional attitude they ascribe (John believes that his brother is a genius) and their reference to a specific utterance event (the act of John saying that). By comparing indirect reports to standard attitude ascriptions introduced by verbs like think, in different presuppositional environments, I will show that speech verbs (a) bear a systematic relationship with one or many speech events and (b) systematically involve the ascription of a propositional attitude to the agent of the report. In spite of this, verbs of speech (i.e. say), unlike standard attitude ascriptions (i.e. think), can allow a detachment from the propositional commitment to the speaker’s beliefs in context in which a presupposition is violated.Furthermore, I will show that the two classes of predicates behave similarly in contexts where the violated presupposition is triggered by additive particles like too, but rather differently when the presupposition is triggered by scalar particles like only and even. Finally, the examination of same-saying examples will shed some light on how grammar, semantic and pragmatic operations interplay during the interpretation of reports. Overall, the idea emerging from the present inquiry is that their most stable meaning component is the attitude ascription, with the speech component, i.e. the referent to an utterance event, seeming more difficult to define and context-dependent.