From reported speech to discourse circulation: a Baktinian reformulation of a grammatical notion

Abstract

This paper is a synthesis, albeit not exhaustive, of the studies on reported speech. It claims that the Bakhtinian postulates opened up ways for the reformulation of both a grammatical notion and of a research area, investigated only at the end of the seventies by the French linguistics of enunciation. At present, certain works on language teaching define direct speech, a supposed uptake of the literal form of the original discourse, as an uptake of another enunciation. In the last thirty years, the literature devoted to this topic has analysed the formal, morpho-syntactic, semantic and pragmatic relations between two discourses. Thus, according to the principle of dialogism, all reporting discourse may become reported, in a telescopic-like phenomenon of successive embeddings. Cases of condensation, dispersion, reaccentuation of semantisms and positioning of the enunciators develop from this. The analysis of a corpus, made up of a denunciation published in a national magazine and subsequently republished in the form of newspaper articles, illustrate the theoretical advances of the Bakhtinian proposal. This analysis shows the discourses as circulating and the reported speech as a relational phenomenon. The analysis also points to the possibility of dealing with the phenomenon of discourse circulation within teaching, using schemes of transmission, i.e., direct, indirect and free indirect speech.