Date of Award

5-1-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Linguistics

First Advisor

Linda Humnick

Abstract

This thesis presents a systematic description of reported speech in vehicular Jula of Burkina Faso as well as the degree to which several recent models of reported speech would account for the two distinct variations of reported speech found in Jula. The descriptive and theoretical aspects of this thesis speak into the fields of typology, discourse, and pragmatics. Some of the interesting typological aspects of Jula reported speech are the use of logophoric pronouns in one category of reported speech, the fact that a quotative particle is present with both categories of reported speech, and the fact that pronominal cataphors are associated with certain speech verbs. Quotation-initial margins are obligatory in Jula and quotation-medial margins can be used for pragmatic purposes.

The models used to analyze the corpus data of this thesis are the typological patterns associated with the direct-indirect dichotomy (Aikhenvald (2008) and Li (1986)) and the models introduced in Aikhenvald (2008), Nikitina (2012c), and Evans (2013). The conclusion is that none of these models is able to fully and elegantly categorize the Jula data. The default versus marked framework, as presented in Levinsohn (in press) and based on the work of Prague School linguists such as Jakobson (1972), is not a reported speech model itself and so does not address all the typological issues involved in categorizing speech types. However, it contributes to the analysis of the Jula data and to questions raised by these models about the pragmatic distribution of speech types. If incorporated into reported speech models, this framework could better equip them to categorize reported speech in languages such as Jula.

Download

Included in

Linguistics Commons

Share

COinS