In a Manner of Speaking: How Reported Speech May Have Shaped Grammar

Abstract

We present a first, broad-scale typology of extended reported speech, examples of lexicalised or grammaticalised reported speech constructions without a regular quotation meaning. These typically include meanings that are conceptually close to reported speech, such as think or want, but also interpretations that do not appear to have an obvious conceptual relation with talking, such as cause or begin to. Reported speech may therefore reflect both concepts of communication and inner worlds, and meanings reminiscent of ‘core grammar’, such as evidentiality, modality, aspect (relational) tense and clause linking. We contextualise our findings in the literature on fictive interaction and perspective and suggest that extended reported speech may lend insight into a fundamental aspect of grammar: the evolution of verbal categories. Based on the striking similarity between the meanings of extended reported speech and grammatical categories, we hypothesise that the phenomenon represents a plausible linguistic context in which grammar evolved.

A Review of Research on Direct Reported Speech

“…This is supported by researches of DRS (along with other reported speech) in a wide range of different language families from the majority of Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan to those of ethnic groups (for collections of these works, see Coulmas, 1986;Janssen & van der Wurff, 1996;Güldemann & von Roncador, 2002). Such studies lead to a hypothesis from linguistic typological perspective that Reported Speech is of great significance to the origin of grammar (Spronck & Casartelli, 2021). These studies provide a fundamental idea that DRS is different from IRS and thus should be treated as a different subject for further studies.…”

Constructions of speech and thought representation

“…Likewise, new methods of data gathering and analysis are enabling more in-depth research into the forms and functions of speech and thought representation in multimodal language corpora of spoken and signed languages alike. Using the cognitive-linguistic concept of fictive interaction as a point of departure, the investigation of ways in which the languages of the world use apparent speech representation structures to express a broad range of grammatical meanings, proposed by Spronck and Casartelli (2021), may hold the key to unlocking large, hitherto underinvestigated areas of grammar. More generally, given its central importance to the question of viewpoint in language-and in particular the management and negotiation of multiple viewpoints in discourse, across all modalities and genres (cf.…”

“…An ambitious part of the fictive interaction research paradigm relates to language typology (e.g., Pascual & Sandler, 2016): where in English and some other Standard Average European languages the notion may appear to be mainly a “type of creative language use” (Spronck & Casartelli, 2021, p. 2), many languages around the world use apparent speech constructions to grammatically and entirely conventionally express meanings as varied as mental states, emotional and attitudinal states, desires, intentions, attempts, states of affairs, causation, reason, purpose and future tense (the listing is that given in Pascual, 2014, p. 90 with terms used as intended there). Consider an example such as (6), from Wan (a Mande language of Ivory Coast):…”

2 The morphosyntax of reported speech and reported thought: A preliminary survey

“…We also do not treat here extended uses of verbs of speaking and verbs of thinking, or of constructions in which such verbs appear (Spronck & Casartelli 2021). It is sometimes difficult, for example, to draw a strict boundary between the notions of thinking and intention or between thinking and perception, and the same expressions are commonly used across languages to encode these and other kinds of inner states.…”