Abstract for Yael Sharvit's talk

Free Indirect Discourse: Quotation or attitude report?
Yael Sharvit (University of Connecticut)
March 30, 2006 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

This talk is concerned with the proper analysis FID (Free Indirect Discourse: a special technique, or style, used by narrators to convey what a character in a story thinks or says). It has often been observed (e.g., Banfield 1982) that FID is a cross between an attitude report and a direct quotation. This is illustrated in (1), where the first sentence, which describes John's actions, may be continued in three different ways to describe what John thought.

(1) John bid me goodbye and walked home.
a. As he watched the children cross the street, he thought: "I will ask this woman to marry me today." Quotation
b. As he watched the children cross the street, he thought that he would ask me to marry him that day. Attitude report
c. He would ask me to marry him today(, he thought as he watched the children cross the street). FID

(1a) and (1c) show that FID is like quotation, because today is interpreted from John's point of view, not the speaker's (cf. John thought that he would ask me to marry him today, where today is interpreted from the speaker's point of view). (1b) and (1c) show that FID is like an attitude report, because he is interpreted as referring to John, not the speaker (cf. John thought: "He will ask this woman to marry him today", where he cannot refer to John).
An immediate question that arises in this connection is whether FID should be analyzed as a special case of quotation or as a special case of attitude report. I try to settle the issue by taking a close look at the behavior of pronouns in those three constructions. Specifically, I argue (contra Schlenker 2004 and following Sharvit 2004) that FID admits "null" (or 'de se') pronouns, and since attitude reports admit them too but quotation does not, FID is an attitude report. However, this point is not easy to make, as FID does indeed display many of the properties characteristic of quotation.