Ernie Lepore

Semantic Theory and Indirect Speech

An overlooked assumption in much of the semantics literature is that there is a close connection between semantic content (whatever a semantic theory attempts to elucidate) and indirect speech. The assumption is that an adequate semantic theory T for a language L should assign p as the semantic content of an utterance u, by A, of a sentence S in L iff ┌A said that p┐ is true.1 We shall dub this assumption MA. In effect, since Galileo in uttering (I) makes (2) true, by MA, any adequate semantics for Italian must interpret (I) to mean that the earth moves.