Variability in the Composition of Tense and Attitude Reports

This thesis investigates the temporal interpretation of tense and aspect in attitude reports through a typological lense. The focus is on Akan, Italian and Germanic languages, but several more languages are discussed (a.o., French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Modern Greek).The cross-linguistic overview shows that micro-variation observed in both SoT and non-SoT languages is more nuanced than what originally believed. It is shown that, while both de se and de re tense construals are available in a language, these are constrained by both semantic and pragmatic factors, ultimately determining the observed semantic distribution.