Quotative

Abstract: It can be seen here that like functions much in the same way as the verb say does in introducing reported speech. In both these examples a form of the verb be followed by like alternates with say, and where be + like occurs, it appears paraphrasable by say with no apparent change in referential meaning. However, we will qualify this considerably in the course of our analysis, because in many, if not most cases, discourses introduced by be + like can also represent internal thought, as Butters (1982) noted. In (3), for example, it is not certain that the speaker actually SAID "no." Rather, the hearer is invited to infer that this is what the speaker was thinking or saying to himself as the girl approached.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: The Corpus of Contemporary American English is the first large, genre-balanced corpus of any language, which has been designed and constructed from the ground up as a 'monitor corpus', and which can be used to accurately track and study recent changes in the language. The 400 million words corpus is evenly divided between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. Most importantly, the genre balance stays almost exactly the same from year to year, which allows it to accurately model changes in the 'real world'. After discussing the corpus design, we provide a number of concrete examples of how the corpus can be used to look at recent changes in English, including morph- ology (new suffixes -friendly and -gate), syntax (including prescriptive rules, quotative like, so not ADJ, the get passive, resultatives, and verb complementa- tion), semantics (such as changes in meaning with web, green, or gay), and lexis-- including word and phrase frequency by year, and using the corpus architecture to produce lists of all words that have had large shifts in frequency between specific historical periods.

Abstract: In this paper we study the quotative system of contemporary British and Canadian youth. Multivariate analysis of nearly 1300 quotative verbs demonstrates that the innovative form belike is productive in both Canada and Britain. Traditional quotatives such as say, go,think, are used according to somewhat different patterns in the two corpora. We suggest that this is the result of differing narrative styles across varieties. However, the linguistic trajectory of the innovative form belike is remarkably parallel, not only across the British and Canadian corpora, but is also comparable with previous reports of this form in the United States. This finding provides evidence for a systematic global diffusion of belike across geographically separated speech communities and calls for further research into the social and linguistic mechanisms underlying such internationally circumscribed linguistic change.