Quotative Indexes in African Languages: A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey

Tom Güldemann

Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2008

Quotative Indexes in African Languages

A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey

Tom Güldemann

Volume 34 in the series Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT]

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110211450

Overview
Contents

About this book

The book represents the results of a synchronic and diachronic cross-African survey of quotative indexes. These are linguistic expressions that signal in the ongoing discourse the presence of a quote (often called "direct reported speech"). For this purpose, 39 African languages were selected to represent the genealogical and geographical diversity of the continent. The study is based primarily on this language sample, in particular on the analysis of quotative indexes and related expressions from a text corpus of each sample language, but also includes a wide range of data from the published literature on other African as well as non- African languages. It is the first typological investigation of direct reported discourse of this magnitude in a large group of languages. The book may thus serve as a starting point of similar studies in other geographical areas or even with a global scope, as well as stimulate more detailed investigations of particular languages. The results of the African survey challenge several prevailing cross-linguistic generalizations regarding quotative indexes and reported discourse constructions as a whole, of which two are of particular interest. In the syntactic domain, where reported discourse has mostly been dealt with under so- called sentential complementation, the study supports the minority view that direct reported discourse and also a large portion of indirect reported discourse show hardly any evidence for the claim that the reported clause is a syntactic object complement of some matrix verb. With respect to grammaticalization, the work concludes that speech verbs are, against common belief, not a frequent source of quotatives, complementizers, and other related markers. Far more frequent sources are markers of similarity and manner; generic verbs of equation, inchoativity, and action; and pronominals referring to the quote or the speaker. Another more general conclusion of the study is that especially direct reported discourse can be fruitfully analyzed as part of a larger linguistic domain called "mimesis". This comprises expressions which represent a state of affairs by means of enactment/ performance rather than with the help of "canonical" linguistic signs and includes, besides reported discourse, world-referring bodily gestures, ideophone-like signs, and non-linguistic sound.

Author / Editor information

Tom Güldemann, Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.

Topics

Frontmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	I
Contents Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	IX
List of maps, tables, and figures Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	XIV
Abbreviations and conventions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	XVIII
Chapter 1. The framework, aim, and data of this study Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 2. The internal structure of quotative indexes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
Chapter 3. Quotative indexes and their linguistic context Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	180
Chapter 4. Previous research on the history of quotatives and a new approach: mimesis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	264
Chapter 5. The origin of quotative indexes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	295
Chapter 6. The functional extension of reported-discourse constructions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	397
Chapter 7. Grammatical functions unrelated to reported-discourseconstructions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	478
Chapter 8. Summary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	515
Backmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	532

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Audience: Research Libraries, Researchers and Advanced Students of African languages as well as Typologists Working on Similar Studies in other Geographical Areas.
Pages
- Front matter: 21
- Main content: 686
Keywords: African languages; language typology

eBook

Published: November 6, 2008
ISBN: 9783110211450

Hardcover

Published: November 17, 2008
ISBN: 9783110185904