ANTHROPOLOGIE LINGUISTIQUE

Anthropologie en partage | La lettre de l’INSHS | mars 2023

Lettre de L’InSHS n° 82 – Paroles en partage [p20] – mars 2023

[TACOL] M. Khachaturyan, Contact-induced variation in reflexivity marking: convergence, divergence and social meaning

Séminaire Terrains, Analyse et COmparaison des Langues (TACOL)

La prochaine séance de notre séminaire TACOL en 2023 aura lieu lundi 22 mai à 14h30, sur place (salle de réunion 311, Campus CNRS de Villejuif) et sur Zoom.

 

Nous aurons le plaisir d’écouter Maria Khachaturyan (postdoc, University of Helsinki).

Titre de la présentation :

Contact-induced variation in reflexivity marking: convergence, divergence and social meaning

Résumé :

It is commonly assumed in language contact studies that languages spoken by multilinguals become more like one another, which leads to long-term convergence between the languages. This does not lead to a sweeping linguistic uniformity, however: there is still an incredible linguistic diversity across the world’s languages. This diversity is partly due to an opposite process — the process of diversification of neighboring languages which was called “neighbor opposition” (Evans 2019).
However, while the results of convergence and diversification are rather well studied, little is known about the complex and contradictory process of convergence and divergence and the role of social factors in it.
In this talk, I present my ongoing study of language contact between the Mano and the Kpelle languages of Guinea and show how, despite the potential of convergence, languages remain distinct. Focusing on variation in reflexive marking, an additional question I raise concerns differences in domains affected by convergence and divergence.
Specifically, I discuss whether contact-induced variation in grammatical patterns can have social meaning on a par with linguistic features with concrete exponents, such as phonetic, morphological or lexical variables.

[TACOL] S.L. Silué, The syntax of reported discourse in Kafire (Senufo, Côte d’Ivoire) : an overview of the constructions and a leap into the universe of the functional domain of demonstration

Séminaire Terrains, Analyse et COmparaison des Langues (TACOL)

La prochaine séance de notre séminaire TACOL en 2023 aura lieu mardi 21 mars à 14h30, sur place (salle de réunion 311, Campus CNRS de Villejuif) et sur Zoom.

 

Nous aurons le plaisir d’écouter Lacina Silue (doctorant, LACITO).

Titre de la présentation :

The syntax of reported discourse in Kafire (Senufo, Côte d’Ivoire) :
an overview of the constructions and a leap into the universe of the functional domain of demonstration

Résumé :

Reported discourse is an important feature of human languages, whether for their characterization (Coulmas 1986: 2, Haberland 1986: 219) or for their buildup (Jakobson 1962: 96, Spronck & Casartelli 2021).
Reported discourse constructions are usually presented as syntactically involving both a reporting segment and a reported segment, with the latter ‘acting’ as if it were the object argument of the speech verb contained in the former (Noonan 1985, Givón 1980: 121, Quirk et al. 1985: 1022–1025) (see Vandelanotte (2008), Munro (1982), De Roeck (1994), McGregor (1994) for more discussion on that topic). However, not only cross-linguistic evidence shows the limit of such a conception (Munro 1982, De Roeck 1994, McGregor 1994), but also this conception gives a restricted picture of the reported discourse constructions occurring in human languages (Güldemann 2008, Mathis & Yule 1994, Spronck 2017).
This presentation presents data showing that reported discourse constructions are rather diverse, especially in Kafire (Senufo, Côte d’Ivoire). It will be shown based on narratives data that the reported discourse constructions involving both the reporting and the reported segments are not the most frequent kind of construction. The frequency hierarchy is presented as Continuation constructions > DR Event + Discourse report (reporting segment + reported segment) > Bare Quotes > Others.
This presentation is also the occasion to explore briefly an interesting aspect of reported discourse within the linguistic system, namely its relation with gesture and expressive elements such as interjections, ideophones and onomatopoeias.
The functional domain that groups them is named demonstration (Clark & Gerrig 1990, Güldemann 2008, Nikitina & Bugaeva 2021)

 

References :
Clark, Herbert H & Richard J Gerrig. 1990. Quotations as demonstrations. Language. 764–805.
Coulmas, Florian. 1986. Reported speech: some general issues. Direct and indirect speech 31. 1–28.
De Roeck, Marijke. 1994. A functional typology of speech reports. In Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen, Lisbeth Falster Jakobsen & Lone Schack Rasmussen (eds.), Function and Expression in Functional Grammar. Berlin, Boston: DE GRUYTER. DOI: 10.1515/9783110872620.331.
Givón, Talmy. 1980. The binding hierarchy and the typology of complements. Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” 4(3). 333–377.
Güldemann, Tom. 2008. Quotative Indexes in African Languages. A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey. en. Georg Bossong, Bernard Comrie & Yaron Matras (eds.) (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT]). Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110211450.
Haberland, Hartmut. 1986. Reported speech in danish. Direct and indirect speech. 219–254.
Jakobson, Roman. 1962. Phonological Studies, volume 1 of Selected Writings. Mouton, The Hague.
Mathis, Terrie & George Yule. 1994. Zero quotatives. Discourse processes 18(1). 63–76.
McGregor, William. 1994. The grammar of reported speech and thought in Gooniyandi. en. Australian Journal of Linguistics 14(1). 63–92. DOI: 10.1080/07268609408599502.
Munro, Pamela. 1982. On the transitivity of ‘say’ verbs. In Studies in Transitivity, 301–318. Brill.
Nikitina, Tatiana & Anna Bugaeva. 2021. Logophoric speech is not indirect: towards a syntactic approach to reported speech constructions. Linguistics 59(3). 609–633.
Noonan, M. 1985. Complementation. In T. Shopen (ed.), Complex constructions, vol. 2 (Language Typology and Syntactic Description), 42–140. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quirk, Randolph et al. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the english language. London: Longman.
Spronck, Stef. 2017. Defenestration: deconstructing the frame-in relation in ungarinyin. English. Journal of Pragmatics. 104–133. DOI: 10.1016 / j . pragma.2017.03.016.
Spronck, Stef & Daniela Casartelli. 2021. In a manner of speaking: how reported speech may have shaped grammar. Frontiers in Communication. 150.
Vandelanotte, Lieven. 2008. Dependency, framing, scope? The syntagmatic structure of sentences of speech or thought representation. WORD. 59(1-2). 55–82. DOI: 10.1080/00437956.2008.11432581.
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