Reports of Specific Indefinites

Utterances of sentences with an indefinite can sometimes be reported with a referential term instead, notably if the indefinite was ‘specific’ but a referential term would not have been appropriate in the original utterance situation. This motivates a reassessment of indefinites and of speech reports. Under the proposed analyses, specific indefinites are referential with respect to what will be called the speaker’s context, as distinct from the common context, and this can shine through in speech reports because they can be sensitive to that context.