Month: December 2020

Posted on

LangNet Winter School Poster Presentation: Extended meanings of Reported Speech

During the LangNet Winter School 2020 I had the opportunity to present the current stage of my research on meaning extensions of reported speech constructions in a poster.

It was a wonderful learning experience and a good opportunity to exchange ideas with my peers and more senior researchers alike. The presentations were held through Zoom, and I received many interesting questions.

The main topics I addressed during my 5min presentation were two examples of languages from my sample that have meaning extensions of RSCs, the methods I use for qualitative and quantitative analysis using an extension package in R, and finally that meaning extensions of RSCs are not limited to geographic areas or language families.

The questions I received addressed the data collection and also how RSCs are classified in my analysis.

This brief presentation and discussion provided useful and constructive feedback that I will implement in my thesis and analysis. Stay tuned! You can access the poster here.

– Daniela

Posted on

Sixth session – Classical Nahuatl and Jula

The final session of our reported speech workshop in 2020 spanned two continents and time periods, with Mauro Alberto Mendoza Posadas discussing Classical Nahuatl and Susie Locklin presenting her recent field data on Jula.

Susie Locklin shared detailed examples of pronominal patterns in Jula narratives, demonstrating that logophoric pronouns are used in some grammatical contexts but not in others. This led to interesting observations about glossing and the interpretation and translation of types of reported speech that cannot be readily translated as standard ‘direct speech’, but also do not qualify as ‘indirect speech’ under any common interpretation.

Mauro Alberto Mendoza Posadas discussed his corpus of Classical Nahuatl texts, consisting of documents from the the 16th and early 17th centuries. Notable features in reported speech in the language included a quotative verb that typically served to introduce reported speech, sometimes preceded by a manner of speech verb, in order to further specify various speech events. Interesting questions arose about how to analyse examples of reported speech in which the quotative verb was absent, and in relation to the connection between reported speech marking and evidential/modal categories in Classical Nahuatl.

We would like to thank all participants who contributed to the reported speech workshop this year, it has been a great pleasure. We are looking forward to seeing everyone again for our continuation after the winter break on the 14th of January

– Stef