The discourse marker ale in Bislama oral narratives

This study takes us to the South Pacific and concentrates on Bislama, one of the dialects of Melanesian pidgin (Siegel 2008: 4) and one of the official languages of Vanuatu. We take a discourse analysis perspective to map out the functions of ale, a conspicuous discourse marker in conversations and narratives. Using Labov & Waletzky (1967) model, we analyze the use of ale in narratives from the book Big Wok: Storian blong Wol Wo Tu long Vanuatu (Lindstrom & Gwero 1998) and determine that ale is a discourse marker which indicates temporal sequence and consequence, frames speech reports and closes a digression. We conclude our study by considering a possible historical development of ale. We map out how French allez could have become Bislama ale using imposition and functional transfer (Siegel 2008; Winford 2013a) of vernacular discourse markers (such as go in Nguna).

Alternatives and Challenges

After an opening section surveying some possible alternative ways of employing semantic plasticity to handle the puzzles, this chapter discusses two challenges to the view developed in chapters 11 and 12. One involves the threat of rampant error in counterfactual speech reports. The second involves certain uncomfortable consequences of applying our favoured treatment of words like ‘that’ and ‘table’ to words like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘person’, ‘thinker’, and ‘conscious’. We show how considerations of semantic plasticity militate in the direction of a kind of “metaphysical misanthropy”, and explore its ethical ramifications.

Embedded root phenomena and indirect speech reports

This article analyzes the occurrence of performative root phenomena in complement clauses. I show that the clauses that host this kind of phenomena have the same distribution as direct speech complements. I argue that the correspondence is based on the fact that, due to their rich syntactic left periphery, these embedded clauses convey speech acts. This assumption receives further support by the grammatical behavior of what I argue are the two major classes of verbs subordinating direct speech and ERP-hosting embedded clauses: locutionary and illocutionary embedding verbs. I analyze illocutionary verbs as bearing an abstract illocutionary predicate selecting either a propositional or a speech-act type, and locutionary verbs as ordinary relational predicates selecting a speech-act type. Taken together, these elements allow for a straightforward syntax-semantics interface and explain the differentiated behavior of root phenomena in complements to locutionary and illocutionary verbs.

Reported speech in Kakabe: Loose syntax with flexible indexicality

Mainstream approaches to the typology of reported discourse have been based on the notion of a direct-indirect continuum: reported speech constructions are traditionally analyzed as conforming to or deviating from the “ideals” of European direct and indirect speech. This study argues that continuum-based approaches fail to distinguish between two dimensions of variation that are systematically discriminated in a number of African languages and should therefore be treated separately. First, different constructions can be recruited for speech reporting, ranging from paratactic to subordinate structures. Second, languages differ in the way pronouns in speech reports are interpreted. In European languages two different deictic strategies are associated with different syntactic types of speech report (‘indirect’ and ‘direct’ deixis is correlated with subordination and parataxis, respectively). In Kakabe, we argue, the choice of pronominal values is independent of the construction’s syntax. Dissociating the construction’s structural properties from the behavior of indexicals allows us to describe the Kakabe strategies of speech reporting as well as account for the seemingly puzzling behavior of reported commands. Our data shows that speech reporting strategies of Kakabe should be treated as a type in its own right: a type characterized by loose syntax and flexible pronominal indexicality.

Acting out on Twitter: Affordances for animating reported speech in written computer-mediated communication

Quotative be like is a construction associated with informal spoken contexts and, especially, with various forms of embodied enactments. This study examines instances of quotative be like in a corpus of Twitter data (1,000,000 tweets; 1,113 quotative instances). Special attention is paid to how users of Twitter employ the platform’s affordances to animate their speech reports – i.e. to represent voices, enact body language, or otherwise ‘dramatize’ the speech reports. The aim is to investigate how a linguistic format which is richly embodied in face-to-face interaction gets ‘re-embodied’ on Twitter. The study finds that animation of reported speech on Twitter is visually, and predominantly typographically, afforded. In the material, oral practices are more frequently reconfigured and remediated rather than directly reproduced. That is to say, even when users are not reproducing spoken utterances, they often employ graphical strategies that are mainly understandable by analogy to spoken and embodied face-to-face interaction. However, users also draw on emergent online repertoires with no face-to-face analogues, such as ‘pure’ typographical play and the recruitment of established online memes. Thus, the findings suggest that orality lingers as a trace, but is not a necessary component, in bringing reported speech to life in a text-based computer-mediated setting.

Respectable uncertainty and pathetic truth in Amazonian Quichua-speaking culture

It is argued in this chapter, on the basis of evidence from grammar, discourse, and verbal art, that for Amazonian Quichua speakers, there is a cultural preference for expressing uncertainty, which is linked with animistic perspectivism. Animistic perspectivism endows nonhumans with subjectivity and implies that there is an infinite multiplicity of perspectives, thereby making a single, totalizing truth impossible. Respectable uncertainty is also apparent in the system of evidentiality, in speech reports, echo questions, and verbal art, all of which emphasize perspective over certainty. A type of certainty that Runa do value, however, and which would not be valid within a rational framework of inquiry, is that of emotional truth, involving feelings of empathy for others, including nonhumans. Emotional truth, then, provides an exception to the preference for uncertainty, and may lead people to confidently reason about ethical matters.​

The proper treatment of egophoricity in Kathmandu Newari

In egophoric (or conjunct/disjunct) verb-marking systems, a conjunct verb form co-occurs with first-person subjects in declaratives and second-person subjects in interrogatives, and also appears in de se attitude and speech reports; a disjunct verb form appears elsewhere. Conjunct marking also interacts with evidentiality: a speaker who abdicates responsibility for the content of an utterance by means of an evidential marker uses the disjunct verb form despite co-occurence with a first-person subject. Focussing on the case of Kathmandu Newari, Coppock and Wechsler propose that conjunct morphology marks the contents of attitudes de se. They develop a formal treatment of egophoricity, including a dynamic discourse model of the way attitudes de se are communicated. The propositional content of an attitude de se, modelled as a set of centered worlds, is effectively uncentered by its agent, to produce an ordinary proposition that is eligible to enter the common ground.