Reporteddesire

Reporteddesire is a term used in linguistic discussions to describe how a speaker communicates another person’s desire or intention using indirect or reported speech. It focuses on clauses that express want, wish, or desire as attributed to someone else rather than to the speaker.

In English, the phenomenon is typically realized through indirect speech: John said that he wanted to go. This contrasts with direct quotation: John said, "I want to go." The reported form often involves tense backshifting and pronoun adjustment, and its interpretation can depend on context, temporal anchoring, and evidential stance. Across languages, the exact morphology and markers vary: some languages encode desiderative meaning with dedicated mood or affixes, while others rely on general reporting constructions.

Functionally, reporteddesire supports storytelling, testimony, and social accounting by conveying others' preferences without repeating exact words. It can influence perceived reliability, immediacy, and distance from the reported event. The concept intersects with desideratives in semantics and with evidentiality and stance-taking in discourse analysis.

Terminology varies; some researchers treat "reported desire" as a subtype of reported speech, while others prefer terms like desiderative reporting or attitudinal reporting. The concept is used in studies of discourse, pragmatics, and cross-linguistic syntax to examine how desires are represented and how different languages tailor the reporting of internal states.

See also: reported speech, desideratives, evidentiality, stance, indirect discourse.