Abstract

This work aims to develop some considerations on an extremely interesting topic for linguistic investigation, namely indirect speech during dialogue. In particular, we will consider ten dialogues between a therapist and schizophrenic patients, starting from a corpus of pathological speech. The focus of our investigation is on the cases of indirect speech produced both by the patient and by the therapist during the therapeutic session. In the cases of indirect speech we can observe a position on the part of the speaker in which what matters is not so much what is reported but the way, from a metalinguistic point of view, in which this is formulated. In indirect speech the message passes through the filter of the speakers so that they feel relatively free from duties of fidelity and can express, from an illocutionary point of view, their personal attitude through the mediation made possible by language devices.As regards schizophrenic language, in our opinion the cases of indirect speech constitute a particularly interesting observatory in which both the patient and the therapist characterize themselves as linguistic and metalinguistic subjects, able to report contents and, at the same time, their attitude toward them.