Betreff: Quotatives

[Dan Parvaz]

Quotatives introduce speech and actions that appear to be direct quotations or demonstrated actions, and attribute them to the subject. And example in English is

(1) And he's all, "La, la, la.." (looking around not paying attention)
(2) And mom's all, "Are you wearing that?"

So the action exmplified by humming and not paying attention are attributed to "he". The "you" in (2) actually refers to the speaker. A German example would be

(3) Und ich so: Mensch! Wie kannst du sowas sagen?

So the "du" doesn't refer to the adressee in the immediate context, but to someone in the narrated event. A final example is Sanskrit "iti" which can be used to introduce literal quotations, but can also be used to discuss states of mind, intention, etc. in something analogous to "I'm going to Grandma's house ITI she went into the forest." Note that in none of these cases can one infer that anyone actually *said* anything.

I'd like to think that ASL (and SLs in general) has a very rich set of these.

Cheers,

Dan.
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