Despite extensive research on reporting verbs, several questions still have to be answered, among which are the following: Which criteria can be employed whereby the functional area of verbs in question can be organised in a principled and systematic way? What is the specific relationship between lexico-semantic and pragmatic information underlying the use of reporting verbs in different contexts? How can this shed light on what reporting agents do in reporting what people do with words? More specifically, besides the general direct illocutionary force of informing, which kind of more indirect illocution can be detected in the use of a given verb in an act of reporting? And what is the role of the axiological evaluation by the reporter as variously inscribed in the report? How can this interplay of dimensions be productively applied to a contrastive analysis of reporting verbs in English and Italian? This study investigates such issues and correlatively attempts to provide some relevant answers by making reference to a composite background (i.e. the framework of Lexical Complexity, Bertuccelli Papi and Lenci 2007; the Dynamic Construal approach, Croft and Cruse 2004; Sbisà's [1989] pragmatic approach) and to corpora data analysis.
Reporting Verbs: A Lexico-Pragmatic Account
MASI, SILVIA
2008-01-01
Abstract
Despite extensive research on reporting verbs, several questions still have to be answered, among which are the following: Which criteria can be employed whereby the functional area of verbs in question can be organised in a principled and systematic way? What is the specific relationship between lexico-semantic and pragmatic information underlying the use of reporting verbs in different contexts? How can this shed light on what reporting agents do in reporting what people do with words? More specifically, besides the general direct illocutionary force of informing, which kind of more indirect illocution can be detected in the use of a given verb in an act of reporting? And what is the role of the axiological evaluation by the reporter as variously inscribed in the report? How can this interplay of dimensions be productively applied to a contrastive analysis of reporting verbs in English and Italian? This study investigates such issues and correlatively attempts to provide some relevant answers by making reference to a composite background (i.e. the framework of Lexical Complexity, Bertuccelli Papi and Lenci 2007; the Dynamic Construal approach, Croft and Cruse 2004; Sbisà's [1989] pragmatic approach) and to corpora data analysis.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
