[Lingtyp] Reportatives in interrogative and imperative sentences

Thu May 7 11:57:15 UTC 2015

Dear Martine,

In order to answer your questions, I believe it is important to distinguish reportatives (evidential markers of the information source of a proposition) from quotatives (marking a passage as something someone else has said) (although some expressions may have both reportative and quotative function), and to distinguish genuine imperatives from other means of expressing commands (e.g. declaratives plus deontic modals).

In my book Epistemic meaning: A crosslinguistic and functional-cognitive study (De Gruyter, 2012), I base my discussion of the issue you raise on such distinctions (see p. 32 on quotatives), and argue (pp. 199-206; in continuation of Aikhenvald 2004) that true, unequivocal reportatives are not found with true imperatives (unless the reportatives have constituent scope only). In contrast, quotatives may be found with imperatives. I also propose an account of this which is based on scope properties and layered semantic structure (notably, the distinction between speech acts, propositions and states-of-affairs).

A more brief discussion of the issue is found in: Boye, Kasper. 2010. "Evidence for what? Evidentiality and scope". Björn Wiemer & Katerina Stathi (eds.). Database on evidentiality markers in European languages. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 63.4. 290-307.

Best wishes,

Kasper

Fra: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] På vegne af Alexandra Aikhenvald
Sendt: 7. maj 2015 13:11
Til: Martine Bruil; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Emne: Re: [Lingtyp] Reportatives in interrogative and imperative sentences

Dear Martine

This issue has been extensively addressed in Chapter 8 of my book Evidentiality (OUP, 2004), 8.1.1, Evidentials in questions, and 8.1.2 Evidentiality in commands. If you don't have this book I could send these  chapters  to you. Then,. the issue of evidentials in commands and questions was addressed in The  grammar of knowledge, OUP, 2014, ed Aikhenvald and Dixon (there are new examples of languages with ample discussion - including languages such as Kurtöp, Ersu, Saaroa, Tatar, Kalmyk...)- I am sure your library has this book.

Evidentials in Amazonia have been extensively addressed in Chapter 9 of my Languages of the Amazon (OUP, 2012, paperback 2015) - you probably have this book already.

We have recently  put together a little web-site on Evidentiality, with a number of publications etc on evidentiality. The link is:
http://research.jcu.edu.au/lcrc/Research%20Projects/evidentiality

This is partly a resource for the contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality; however, it contains reference and a bibliography on this topic, so will hopefully be useful to many people. This also contains materials on evidentials in commands and in questions.

The Oxford Handbook of evidentiality will - of course -address this issue in some depth.

Further data on evidentials in commands and questions are in my forthcoming paper 'Evidentials and their links with categories' will be coming out in Linguistic Typology this year. (This is based on a paper given at the workshop you organized last year). I will send you an offprint when it is out.

So the issue is really well researched, and there is a lot of accessible information.

Hope this is helpful.

Best wishes

Sasha

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, PhD, DLitt, FAHA
Distinguished Professor and Australian Laureate Fellow
Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre
James Cook University
PO Box 6811, Cairns, Queensland 4870, Australia
http://www.jcu.edu.au/faess/JCUPRD_043649.html
mobile 0400 305315, office 61-7-40421117
fax 61-7-4042 1880  http://www.aikhenvaldlinguistics.com/
https://research.jcu.edu.au/researchatjcu/research/lcrc

________________________________
Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2015 10:52:07 -0700
From: martinebruil at gmail.com<mailto:martinebruil at gmail.com>
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Reportatives in interrogative and imperative sentences
Dear all,
I am interested in the use of reportatives in different sentence types in different languages. I would like to know whether a reportative can be used in interrogative and imperative sentences. If it can be used in interrogatives, what does this mean? Can one use the reportative in sentences in order to report someone else's question, does it mean that you are asking about what has been said or does it have any other effect? Would would the use of the reportative with imperatives mean? Any examples and references will be highly appreciated!
Best,
Martine Bruil

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