Recensione volume 'Oratio obliqua. Strategies of reported speech in ancient languages, ed. Paolo Poccetti, Pisa-Roma, Serra, 2017'

The phenomenon of reported speech in the world languages has gained attentionin current linguistic research, as testified by the increasing number ofrecent works in this field, from typological linguistics ( Jäger 2007 ; Goddard &Wierzbicka 2018) to neurolinguistics (Groenewold 2015 and references therein).Although the wide cross-linguistic diversity in the way speakers report other people’sspeech, there is a consensus on the need for identification strategies that aretypologically valid. To this purpose, reported speech has also been investigatedfrom many theoretical perspectives, from Functional Grammar to Natural SemanticMetalanguage, from Generative Grammar to Pragmatics, from Philosophyof Language to Sociolinguistics. In my opinion, this challenge might alsobenefit from a diachronic perspective, which takes into account data from ancientlanguages. The volume under review, Oratio obliqua. Strategies of reported speechin ancient languages, edited by Paolo Poccetti, developed from a workshop whichwas held at the 17th Conference of Latin Linguistics (Rome, 2013, 20th-25th May).