Re: Nested quotes and "al/el"

[cbmvax!uunet!math.ucla.edu!jimc]

avl0@gte.com (Alan Lemmon) writes:
> "Sez" and "lis": The "point" of a story may indeed be what the
> participants say to each other, but what the narrator is telling us
> is their statements and actions.  If you believe the narrator,
> then you believe that the people did indeed say those things.
> But they may have been lying....

Yes, there are two different assertion streams here: the narrator tells
us a bunch of speakers and their texts, but also, the reported dialog
is supposed to form a coherent discourse.  The speaker will emphasize
one or the other depending on his purpose.  For example, to say:

	The defendant said to me, "there's a body in the trunk of the car"

a witness would probably choose a predication with dikta (say) just as
I have shown the English.  However, in entertainment dialog there is
suspension of disbelief; everyone knows it's fiction; the alleged
speaker doesn't even exist, and much less did he say the alleged
dialog.  So asserting that he did say it makes no sense.  Similarly,
court records are authoritative and there is no need to assert on every
paragraph that "The honorable judge said..."; merely by being in a
court record, the speaker designations are to be believed, and so the
court reporters use a script-like style rather than English direct
quotes.

> How would you
> express "John said that Sally said that Mary ate an apple"?

For this I would use a nested sequence of direct quotes.  nested
scriptlike dialog is also feasible but does not seem appropriate for
this specific example.  

		-- jimc