Schedule 72. StuTS

Referring to another person’s utterances is thought to be a universal ability of natural languages. Referred speech comes in many shapes, most commonly as direct speech. Research in direct speech in recent years has focused on the typological possibilities that languages have to construct referred speech (e.g. Buchstaller & van Alphen 2012). Syntactic properties of historical languages are famously understudied, as is the reconstruction of direct speech. From a European point of view, old IE languages may not offer the most exciting structures to quote speech, but their structures are not so similar that a reconstruction of direct speech for PIE would be trivial. The last comparative treatment of direct speech has been done by Hock (1982).
In this talk I’m going to present the structures of direct speech in four old IE languages (Hittite, Vedic Sanskrit, Greek and Latin) attempting to find a common source. I’ll argue that in PIE’s direct speech construction, the speech quote is used as a canonical direct speech (von Roncador 1988), showing no signs of subordination or quotatives. Furthermore, the speech introduction consists minimally of a verbum dicendi. Most special constructions in the daughter languages may be explained by a structure in PIE ‘Thus’-Prtc – Verb – (Subj.) triggered by information structure.
Buchstaller, Isabelle & Ingrid van Alphen. 2012. Quotatives: cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Amsterdam: JBPC.
Hock, Hans Henrich. 1982. ”The Sanskrit Quotative: a historical and comparative study”, in: LS. 12/2. 39 – 85.
Von Roncador, Manfred. 1988. Zwischen direkter und indirekter Rede. Berlin: DeGryuter.

Info

Day: 2022-11-05
Start time: 11:15
Duration: 00:30
Room: Wiwi-Bunker —Room 4047
Track: Historical Linguistics
Language: en

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