Perspectives in reported discourse

This thesis addresses issues regarding propositional attitudes, with an overarching theme of how the speaker's choice of perspective (between his own and the reported agent's) manifests itself in attitude reports. I take up four dimensions of perspective: analytic, logophoric, deictic, and empathic. The analytic perspective concerns the de re and de dicto modes of attitude reports. I defend the "sententialist" approach to the de relde dicto distinction over the "propositionalist" (scope-based) approach, and argue that the de dicto mode reflects the fact that the speaker chooses descriptive terms (linguistic forms) from the reported agent's perspective.; The logophoric perspective concerns the de se/non- de se opposition, which has recently attracted wide attention in the light of new cross-linguistic data. Building on the widely accepted view that the object of a de se report is a Kaplanian propositional character, I develop a solution to two problems known in the literature: (i) how to capture the relation between what the complement clause denotes and what the "original" utterance/belief represents in a generalized way, and (ii) how to properly restrict occurrences and possible interpretations of indexical expressions.; The deictic and empathic perspectives concern the choice of the reference point(s) for deictic predicates (e.g., go and come ) and the determination of the empathy relation (a la Kuno). First, I observe that the pragmatic meanings associated with deictic predicates/empathy-loaded expressions are presuppositional, and further point out that their projection pattern with respect to an attitude predicate has interesting correlations with the choice of the speaker's perspective. Then, I propose to treat deictic predicates/empathy-loaded expressions as indexicals, which refer to either the external context of utterance or a secondary context. (In this sense, the deictic and empathic perspectives can be understood as subcomponents of the logophoric perspective.); Towards the end of the thesis, I discuss several factors that affect the possible or favored choice of perspective, including (i) the interaction among the subtypes of perspective (e.g., the bias for the consistency of perspective), and (ii) the implicational hierarchy of the semantic types of attitude predicates.