Quoting and reporting across languages: A system-based and text-based typology

Abstract

This paper reports on a cross-linguistic corpus-based investigation of linguistic strategies of quoting and reporting of speech and thought across six genetically unrelated languages (Arabic, English, Dagaare, Hindi, Spanish and Japanese). Specifically, the study draws on Michael Halliday's concept of projection that covers the traditional categories of quoting and reporting as a type of logico-semantic relation. The study also examines projection “trinocularly”, by viewing quoting and reporting from three viewpoints, namely their semantics, their lexicogrammatical realizations and the structural configuration they display. The use of projection as a unified domain of inquiry and the trinocular perspective ensures a systematic accounting of the generality and specificity of projection across the languages. Section 1 specifies our investigation, relating it to the traditional account of quoting and reporting. Section 2 describes our corpus data. Section 3 introduces the theoretical and descriptive categories used to describe verbal and mental projection as a type of logico-semantic relation, using English for illustration. Section 4 presents a crosslinguistic discussion of the data from the six languages. Finally, Section 5 compares and contrasts the results of this study, discusses the general and language-specific features of projection and concludes by commenting on how our approach to quoting and reporting extends previous approaches.

Keywords:

• projection
• quoting
• reporting
• cross-linguistic
• reportative constructions
• logico-semantic relation
• systemic functional linguistics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Abhishek Kumar Kashyap http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2760-5515

Notes

1. The symbols [α] and [β] indicate hypotactic relationship between two clauses, where [α] indicates the main (or primary) clause and [β] indicates the dependent (or secondary) clause. On the other hand, the numbers [1], [2], [3], etc. indicate clauses that are paractactically related, where each number indicates the corresponding order of the clause in the clause-complex.

2. Although we include punctuation in our discussion, this is not a major concern here. The issue of punctuation deserves a paper of its own, where it should be compared to equivalent resources in oral speech.

3. Similar phenomena may be found in other languages. See, for instance, de Vries (1995) about Wambon (a Papuan language).

4. The dependency in Hindi (and in most Indo-Aryan languages) is structural at clause rank, while the realization of tense is a morphological phenomenon that is part of the agreement paradigm, as in Bajjika (Kashyap 2012, Kashyap & Yap 2017), and that has little to do with dependency: (see Kashyap & Prakasam (in preparation) for details).

5. The realization of mood varies across the six languages discussed in the present study. English realizes mood by variation in the order of clause elements, i.e. Subject and Finite (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: Ch. 4); Arabic (Bardi 2008) realizes mood by inflectional verbal morphology and mood particles; Japanese (Teruya 2004, 2007) realizes mood by the combination of verbal morphology and clause final particles; Dagaare realizes mood by the placement of mood particles in the verbal group and clause final position (Mwinlaaru 2017: Ch. 4); Hindi realizes mood by intonation and Spanish by a combination of verbal morphology and intonation (Lavid et al. 2010, Ch. 4; Quiroz 2013: Ch. 3) – see also Teruya et al. (2007), Mwinlaaru et al. (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Dean's Reserve, Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Grant number 1-ZVB4).