Fictive (in)direct speech: Non-genuine speech (re)presentation in discourse, grammar, and the lexicon

In the traditional, formal categorization, direct speech can only be used to represent communicative acts, so that “reported beliefs, thoughts, feelings and mental acts can only appear in the language in the form of an indirect rather than a direct speech clause” (Banfield 1973: 29). This theory chapter stems from the assumption that quotational direct speech, namely actual reported speech genuinely used to reenact previously produced discourse, solely constitutes the prototype. As it is, in numerous unrelated spoken and signed languages, including isolates, the same direct-speech structure used for ordinary quotation are also used for non-quotational functions, namely for the (re)presentation of thoughts, emotions, attitudes, intentions, attempts, and often also for expressing evidentiality, causation, or even the future tense. Direct speech for non-reports has been mostly studied by focusing on a few of its manifestations, often treated as separate phenomena. In this piece I make a case for the need for a unified account, what I call fictive (in)direct speech (Pascual 2002, 2006, 2024; Pascual & Sandler, 2016), which covers previously studied phenomena as well as related but under-studied ones, such as non-quotative, non-genuine dialogue (e.g. “knock-knock-who’s-there-fill-in-the-blank mentality”, “How-are-you-fine-.thank-you-and-you-fine-thank-you' syndrome”, Pascual 2014: 63). Such types of demonstrations are construed as non-genuine or fictive, in the sense of Talmy ([1996] 2000), in that they are utterly conceptual or imagined in nature and presented purely for the communicative purposes of ongoing discourse.