Metalanguage and subjectivity in indirect reports

This study attempts to show that Persian reporters, just like English speakers, are able to indicate their divergence from the original utterances in indirect reporting. The metalanguage comments in the Persian indirect reports highlighted situations where reporters monitored (i.e. self-regulated) themselves by changing the verbs of saying (e.g. ‘said’, ‘claimed’, etc.), assessing the appropriateness of the discourse and communicating uncertainty. We also discuss a number of examples where there was disagreement in the Persian indirect reports (the original speakers did not accept the report to be genuine) because the practice of samesaying (similarity of content) was not being strictly adhered to. We conclude that indirect reports allow for several forms of manipulation for different purposes, whereby the reporter can make use of syntactic strategies to monitor the discourse (i.e. manipulating the original utterance). Moreover, reports can sometimes be influenced by interpreted information (which may be incorrect) which can cast doubt on fair paraphrasing and the practice of samesaying.
Source: Lingua - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research