The question of reported speech: Identifying an occupational hazard

Abstract

This essay is a short survey of several everyday concepts. It illustrates their inherent slipperiness and the futility of trying to secure them for formal academic purposes. In our studies, the concepts of ‘direct reporting’ and ‘indirect reporting’ are taken to be scientifically authoritative in some sense, but the terms used to underpin them are not. ‘Quoting’, ‘paraphrasing’, ‘reporting’, ‘saying’, ‘telling’, ‘speaking’, and ‘using language’ are employed from an everyday lexicon, which invites the quasi-scientific question: “What really are these things?” The question becomes redundant before it can be answered.