Thought complements in Australian languages

McGregor, William B.

doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2021.101398

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…A similar phenomenon is reported by McGregor (2021) for an Australian language Warrwa, where the generic verb 'say, do, think' hosts an oblique pronominal marker that can cross-reference either the addressee of a speech event or the topic spoken about (see also Spronck 2015 on Ngarinyin). With expressions of reported thought, however, it can only cross-reference the topic, and corpus data suggests that such interpretation is dispreferred with reported speech.…”

Section: Unusual Interpretation Of Addressee Markingsupporting

confidence: 67%

“…This approach distinguishes our study from previous studies that focus on specific lexical expressions and translational equivalents of English mental activity verbs (Fortescue 1990;Persson 1993;Onishi 1997;Stanwood 1997;Viberg 2004, inter alia) or on specific construction types (cf. the survey of thought complements in Australian languages by McGregor 2021). One of our findings follows directly from the lack of assumption that the notion of thinking must be expressed in any particular way: we find that a significant proportion of instances of reported thought do not involve any specialized lexical items, and they instantiate a variety of construction types beyond what could be observed if data were searched for specific words or syntactic relations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

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

Nikitina,

Aplonova

2023

The Grammar of Thinking

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This study addresses the relationship between the reporting of speech and the reporting of thought based on a set of annotated data from several typologically diverse languages. The context-based approach we adopt allows us to explore the relationship between reported speech and reported thought without relying on specific lexical or constructional cues.We identify three types of relationship between reported speech and reported thought. First, in all our languages, reported speech constructions can be recruited for the expression of reported thought; such uses can only be identified based on context. Second, in some of the languages, we find expressions that are best described in terms of speech-to-thought coercion: in a construction normally associated with reported speech, a verb of thinking or another lexical marker triggers a reported thought interpretation. Such an interpretation is sometimes at odds with the construction's original properties, since situations of thinking and speaking differ in a number of linguistically relevant ways.For example, situations of thinking do not involve an addressee, and that difference accounts for the seemingly superfluous use, in some languages, of expressions such as "think inside one's head" or "think to oneself", which serve to reconcile the construction's argument properties (an implied addressee) with its coerced interpretation. Speech-to-thought coercion also explains why, despite the absence of an addressee in the verb's argument structure, it is possible to refer to addressees within thought reports. Finally, in some languages, reported thought constructions are attested that have no equivalent among expressions of reported speech.We conclude, based on the structural diversity of reported thought expressions, that reported thought cannot be treated as a uniform cross-linguistic concept in a way similar to reported speech (Spronck & Nikitina 2019), and that conceptualization of thought processes varies across languages in ways that make direct comparison impossible.Acknowledgements: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 758232). We would like to thank our fellow project members for their assistance, in particular Elena Perekhvalskaya, Abbie Hantgan-Sonko, Lacina Silué, and Guillaume Guitang. We are also grateful to our language consultants and assistants: Alexander Savelyev, Fizaliya Makhianova, and Sekou Coulibali. Moreover, we would like to thank Valentin Vydrin for his comments on the Bambara data.

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Section: Unusual Interpretation Of Addressee Markingsupporting

confidence: 67%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

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

Nikitina,

Aplonova

2023

The Grammar of Thinking

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“…Finally, the articles have also opened up various avenues for further research, but here we single out just one. McGregor's (2021) finding that constructions with belief and thought complements are hard to discriminate from reported speech constructions in Australian languages cautions us against extrapolating what we have learned about English structures to other languages. In fact, recent research shows that even in closely related Dutch, parentheticals with limited formal variability and with schematic, speaker-related meanings (viz.…”

Section: Articles In This Collectionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Revisiting complement and parenthetical constructions: theory and description

2023

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“…To investigate such cases crosslinguistically, they propose to use the term “extended reported speech,” to avoid conflation with the more creative usage types seen in English and similar languages. As a promising research field, fictive interaction can connect cognitive linguistics with existing typological research into speech and thought representation (e.g., Buchstaller & van Alphen, 2012; Güldemann, 2008; Güldemann & von Roncador, 2002; McGregor, 1994, 2008, 2019, 2021; Spronck & Nikitina, 2019).…”

Section: Basic Conceptual Notionsmentioning

confidence: 99%