Japanese Reported Speech: Towards an Account of Perspective Shift as Mixed Quotation

Abstract

English direct reported speech is easily distinguished from indirect reported speech by, for example, the lack of a complementizer (that), the quotation marks (or the accompanying prosody), and/or verbatim (‘shifted’) pronouns. By contrast, Japanese employs the same complementizer for all reports, does not have a consistent intonational quotation marking, and tends to drop pronouns where possible. Some have argued that this shows no more than that many Japanese reports are ambiguous. They claim that, despite the lack of explicit marking, the underlying distinction is just as hard in Japanese as it is in English. On the basis of a number of ‘mixed’ examples, I claim that the line between direct and indirect is blurred and I propose a unified analysis of speech reporting in which a general mechanism of mixed quotation replaces the classical two-fold distinction.