Quotative indexes in African languages

Viac o knihe

This work presents findings from a comprehensive cross-African survey of quotative indexes, which are linguistic expressions indicating the presence of quotes in discourse. The study encompasses 39 African languages, chosen for their genealogical and geographical diversity. It primarily analyzes quotative indexes and related expressions from a text corpus of each language, while also incorporating data from published literature on both African and non-African languages. This investigation is the first of its kind to examine direct reported discourse across such a wide range of languages, potentially serving as a foundation for similar studies globally and encouraging further exploration of specific languages. The results challenge several established cross-linguistic generalizations about quotative indexes and reported discourse. Notably, in the syntactic realm, the study supports the minority perspective that direct and much indirect reported discourse do not substantiate the claim that the reported clause functions as a syntactic object complement of a matrix verb. Additionally, it finds that speech verbs are less common sources for quotatives and related markers than previously thought; instead, markers of similarity, manner, and certain generic verbs are more prevalent. The research also suggests that direct reported discourse can be analyzed within a broader linguistic domain called "mimesis," which includes various for