Paper short abstract

concession, agreement, particles, Wolof, grammaticalization, implicature, pragmatics

Paper short abstract

evidentiality, Luganda, Bantu, epistemic modality, corpus

Paper short abstract

evidentiality, tense, aspect, grassfields, bantu, semantics, pragmatics

Paper long abstract

I will discuss novel data exhibiting evidential restrictions associated with a subset of Dschang's temporal and aspectual configurations.

Paper short abstract

(oral presentation), quotatives, Niger-Congo, grammaticalization

Paper long abstract

Across languages, quotative markers commonly go back to verbs of speaking or generic action verbs, as well as markers of similarity or approximation, such as 'like', or nouns meaning 'kind', 'type', 'sort'. The mechanism behind this change is relatively well understood, as predicates introducing reported speech or attitude reports become grammaticalized into specialized quote-introducing markers.

In Dogon languages we find an unusual kind of change that cannot be explained by the same diachronic mechanism: the quotative marker appears to be derived from the marker of addressee. We review primary data recently compiled for the purposes of a comparative study of discourse reporting strategies across West African languages to shed light on this phenomenon and suggest that this change was brought about by the special status of reported commands in which the addressee regularly coincides with the (pragmatic) subject.

Our account relies on the observation that reported commands show special properties with respect to how the command's addressee, or the pragmatic subject, is coded. In Wan (Mande), the addressee phrase can exceptionally introduce reported commands in a construction that is not attested elsewhere, in comparison with the use of the quotative marker in Dogon languages. We note that an addressee of a discourse report is, essentially, the subject of a quoted command, and thus the position is fluid with respect to its syntactic/semantic function.

We conclude that the reported commands enjoy a special status among discourse reports and may trigger unique types of diachronic change such as the reanalysis of addressee-marking postpositions as quotative markers.