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Indirect Reports and Pragmatics pp 471–488Cite as

Integrated Parentheticals in Quotations and Free Indirect Discourse

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Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 5))

Abstract

Free Indirect Discourse and Quotations are introduced by a special kind of parentheticals, minimally constituted by a subject and a predicate of saying, thinking etc. I propose that these parentheticals are represented in a syntactic structure integrated with that of the reported sentence. The phrases hosting the parentheticals are projected by prosody oriented heads, i.e., heads which do not express a lexical content, but are read at the syntax-phonology interface as special instructions for realizing the peculiar intonation associated to parentheticals,, the so-called comma intonation. I show that this approach offers several advantages, contributing in solving some long standing problems connected with the syntactic status of parentheticals in general.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We actually attribute to Winston, i.e., the character present in the narration – thoughts in the first person: “… and I have only four cigarette left”. This is however a separate issue, much investigated in the literature on the topic, which I will not further consider here. See, for instance Banfield (1982), Guéron (2006; 2008), Sharvit (2004), Schlenker (2003, 2004).

  2. 2.

    This proposal is quite general and might be taken to hold for several kinds of parentheticals, besides QU and FID one.

  3. 3.

    To this extent, see among the many others Banfield (1982), who criticized a movement derivation for FID parentheticals. For reasons of space, I do not reproduce the relevant evidence here, taking for granted the reasons already discussed in the literature.

  4. 4.

    Even if a linearization algorithm for three-dimensional trees can indeed be hypothesized – see Moltmann (1992) – a theory encompassing such an algorithm would be extremely powerful and therefore to be disfavored on principled grounds.

  5. 5.

    The so-called cartographic approach, developed by Cinque (1999) and scholars, is based on such a principle. The present work is developed largely in the same framework. According to the cartographic approach, in the spirit of Kayne’s (1994) proposal, adjunction is never available and a head H must intervene when a non-argument, as for instance an adverbial, is added to the structure.

  6. 6.

    Coherently with these considerations, in the cartographic approach – cf. Cinque (1999) – adverbs appear as Specifiers of a dedicated head, in a structure like (17). See also fn5.

  7. 7.

    In this section I am ignoring the problems connected with subject inversion. I will briefly mention this issue below in section 5.

  8. 8.

    Here I discuss quotations, but the same reasoning holds for FID clauses. See also Matos (2013) for a discussion of topicalization in quotations.

  9. 9.

    The term remnant movement refers to the movement of a phrase already affected by movement, containing therefore a copy of a phrase already moved out of it.

  10. 10.

    For reasons of space, I will not provide here a full discussion of ellipsis in these cases. Further work is indeed required. Note also that, as often observed in ellipsis phenomena, the fragment on the right and the one on the left might be not hundred percent identical. This issue should be more carefully investigated especially by means of corpora of spoken language, where these phenomena are more likely to occur. Furthermore, from the analysis provided in the text, it also follows that the host sentence is always inserted twice: once in the KP on the left of the parenthetical and once as the KP complement, on its right, even in those cases where no fragment appears on the right – as for instance in I will leave tomorrow, said John. Actually, nothing so far seems to run against this conclusion, but, again, further study is required.

  11. 11.

    Note that the necessity of a coherent interpretation of I and tomorrow, might seem a trivial fact. It might be so from a semantic point of view, but it is far from being such from a syntactic one.

  12. 12.

    Adverbs such as probabilmente (probably), fortunatamente (fortunately) and francamente (frankly), etc. also allow a non-parenthetical usage. For an analysis of their positions in the non parenthetical case, see Cinque (1999); for a comparison between the parenthetical and non-parenthetical one, see Giorgi (to appear a).

  13. 13.

    In Italian credere (believe) selects the subjunctive in the subordinate clause, hence the form abbia detto (has-subj said). This fact however does not have any import on the argument considered here.

  14. 14.

    As already mentioned above, Quotations and Free Indirect Discourse have different properties, even if they share the characteristics of substituting totally – in the case of QU – or partially – in the case of FID – the speaker’s spatial and temporal coordinates. Many scholars considered this and related issues. Cf., among the many others, Doron (1991), Giorgi (to appear b), Guéron (2006; 2008), Sharvit (2004), Schlenker (2003, 2004).

  15. 15.

    Note that in examples (38) and (39) above, the relevant argument is not the parenthetical main subject, but the subject of the saying predicate. The correct generalization therefore might be slightly more complex than the one provided in text. Note in fact, that in all the examples the relevant argument is the closest one to the leftmost position in C. The notion of minimal distance therefore is presumably relevant in this domain as well, as in many other cases in syntax.

  16. 16.

    Rizzi (1997) hypothesized for the left periphery the following structure:

    1. i.

      FORCE Topic* Focus Topic* FIN IP

    Force is the complementizer for finite clauses, whereas FIN is the complementizer of non-finite clauses. Left-peripheral focus in Italian can only be a contrastive focus. Note that topics can appear either on the left or on right of contrastive focus; the star signals that more than one topic can appear on either side.

  17. 17.

    Note that for the speakers that can attribute the production of the focus to the subject of the parenthetical, the sentence is not totally ungrammatical.

  18. 18.

    Cf. for instance Cinque (1990), Frascarelli (2000), Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl (2007), Benincà and Poletto (2004). For an important different analysis of focus constructions, in particular with respect to the hypothesis of movement to the left periphery, see Samek-Lodovici (2015). The issue deserves further inquiry, to properly reconcile contrasting empirical evidence.

  19. 19.

    Note that domani (tomorrow) is a topic as well, in pre-parenthetical position. On the necessity of a pre-parenthetical topic, see below in section 5.

  20. 20.

    See Dehé and Kavalova (2007), in particular, the discussion in De Vries’ chapter (2007, pp. 203–235).

  21. 21.

    In the discourse John said: “Mary left”, where no object pronoun appears, we can either hypothesize the presence of a null pronoun referring the following sentence, or, perhaps more plausibly, an ellipsis process, similar to the one taking place in question answering: Who left? John left, taking place in the specifier phrase:

    i. [John said that Mary left [H [Mary left]]]

  22. 22.

    According to my intuition, inversion is not really obligatory, especially when the parenthetical is “heavy”, i.e., containing other items beside the subject and the verb. Consider for instance the following example:

    1. i.

      L’azienda venderà la sua filiale a Parigi, il presidente comunicò alla commissione durante la riunione

      The company will sell its brunch in Paris, the president told the committee during the meeting

    It is not clear however whether this factor is relevant in Spanish and Portuguese as well.

  23. 23.

    For a discussion, see Collins (1997) and Collins and Braningan (1997).

  24. 24.

    See also Giorgi and Pianesi (1997) for a discussion.

  25. 25.

    For an analysis of the past forms in Italian, see Bertinetto and Squartini (1996) and Squartini and Bertinetto (2000).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Ca’ Bembo, Dorsoduro 1075, 30123, Venice, Italy

    Alessandra Giorgi

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  1. Alessandra Giorgi
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Cognitive Sciences, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

  2. Department of Linguistics Department, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Institute for Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary

    Ferenc Kiefer

  3. Department of Philosophy, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Franco Lo Piparo

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Giorgi, A. (2016). Integrated Parentheticals in Quotations and Free Indirect Discourse. In: Capone, A., Kiefer, F., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Indirect Reports and Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21395-8_21

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