Quotatives

Research on quotation has yielded a rich and diverse knowledge-base. Scientific interest has been sparked particularly by the recent emergence of new quotative forms in typologically related and unrelated languages (i.e. English be like, Hebrew kazé, Japanese mitai-na).The present collection gives a platform to research conducted within different linguistic sub-disciplines and on the basis of a variety of Western and non-Western languages. The introduction presents an overview of forms and functions of old and new quotative constructions. The nine chapters investigate quotation from different perspectives, from conversation analysis over grammaticalization and language variation and change to typological and formal approaches. The collection advocates a comprehensive approach to the phenomenon 'quotation', seeking a more nuanced knowledge-base as regards the linguistic properties, social uses and pragmatic functions than monolingual or single disciplinary approaches deliver. The cross-disciplinary nature and the wealth of data make the findings broadly available and relevant.

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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.

Black South African English, the variety of English used by mother-tongue speakers of South Africa's indigenous languages, has received considerable attention during the last two decades. However, so far most of the accounts of this variety have been only qualitative in nature. This book reports on one of the first studies offering extensive quantitative analyses of four typical features of Black South African English grammar: omission of past tense marking, extended use of the progressive aspect, article omission, and use of left dislocation. Drawing on a corpus of spoken data, the study's focus lies on the investigation of the stability of the selected features and hence aims to ascertain which of these are characteristic of Black South African English as a whole. Speakers exhibiting differing levels of competence in English are compared. It is shown that the analysed features are used by speakers of Black South African English regardless of their proficiency level, but, at the same time, there are considerable differences concerning the frequency of occurrence of these features.

The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction is an invaluable reference work featuring contributions from leading global scholars, available both online and as a three-volume print set. The definitive international reference work on a topic of major and increasing importance, in a new series of sub-disciplinary international encyclopedias Provides state-of-the-art research for scholars in a highly interactive and accessible format, available both online and as a three-volume print set Covers key research topics in the field with contributions from a team of experienced, global editors Successfully brings into a single source, explication of all of the fascinating and ground-breaking Language and Social Interaction work developing globally and across subjects Part of The Wiley Blackwell-ICA International Encyclopedias of Communication series, published in conjunction with the International Communication Association. Online version available at Wiley Online Library

Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style.

A collection of cross-varietal studies on a spectrum of grammatical features in English varieties spoken all over the world. It explores the structural unity and diversity of New Englishes and thus investigates central aspects of dialect evolution and language change.

Storytelling is a fundamental mode of everyday interaction. This book is based upon the Narrative Corpus (NC), a specialized corpus of naturally occurring narratives, and provides new paths for its study. Christoph Rühlemann uses the NC's narrative-specific annotation and XPath and XQuery, query languages that allow the retrieval of complex data structures, to facilitate large-scale quantitative investigations into how narrators and recipients collaborate in storytelling. Empirical analyses are validated using R, a programming language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. Using this unique data and methodological base, Rühlemann reveals new insights, including the discovery of turntaking patterns specific to narrative, the first investigation of textual colligation in spoken data, the unearthing of how speech reports, as discourse units, form striking patterns at utterance level, and the identification of the story climax as the sequential context in which recipient dialogue is preferentially positioned.