Publication of: "Direct speech, silent pauses, speech verbs, and basic word order: a comparative corpus study of 12 languages", with Jocelyn Aznar and Frank Seifart
This study investigates cross-linguistically the position of speech verbs and the occurrence of silent pauses relative to direct speech reports in narrative oral texts. We hypothesize that the position of speech verbs depends on the basic word order of verbs and their complements (VO vs. OV), and that the occurrence of speech verbs and pauses exhibit complementarity based on their shared function of marking the onset or end of reported speech. We use language documentation corpora from an areally balanced sample of 12 languages. We show that in most VO languages speech verbs exclusively precede speech reports, while in OV languages they may precede or follow them, or intervene, as middle verbs. Speakers of VO languages very often pause after speech reports, i.e. the position where there is no speech verb, while speakers of OV languages often pause before the speech report, and almost never between a speech report and a following ending verb. We conclude that basic word order substantially influences how speech reports are construed and prosodically phrased, in addition to asymmetries resulting from constraints on sequential ordering that are specific to complex units in general and to reported speech in particular.
This article was part of the project QUEST