A logically transparent approach to discourse reporting

In this essay we develop a theory of discourse reports. The theory provides a common set of structural and interpretive principles that together accou nt for the truth conditions of direct, indirect and mixed reports. A distin guishing feature of our view is the assumption that the complement sentence of a report divides exclusively and exhaustively into regions that charact erize the content of the reported utterance and regions that characterize t he form of the utterance. This assumption implies that mixed reports do not imply full direst or indirect reports. We discuss a classical Davidsonian proposal by Herman Cappelen anti Ernest Lepore which conflicts with our the ory on this latter point and show that it is unable to account for many of the phenomena we discuss.