From hearsay evidentiality to samesaying relations

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627 www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua

From hearsay evidentiality to samesaying relations§ Ricardo Etxepare IKER (UMR5478), CNRS, 15, Place Paul Bert, 64100 Bayonne, France Received 30 November 2007; received in revised form 18 July 2008; accepted 18 July 2008

Abstract Main clauses in Spanish optionally include a root complementizer. The presence of the complementizer adds a reportative component to the meaning of the clause. This paper attempts to characterize more precisely the kind of grammatical object represented by those reports. It argues that the Spanish main clause reports must be analyzed as instances of quotative constructions, and that the latter must be represented as involving an underlying predication between a clausal constituent and a quotative predicate. This predicate is overt in many languages, but silent in Spanish. The paper provides syntactic arguments in support of this hypothesis, as well as a comparison between the properties of those constructions and hearsay evidentiality, which is argued to be a different phenomenon. # 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V. Keywords: Quotative constructions; Hearsay evidentiality; Root complementizer; Parataxis; Speech events; Quotative predicates

1. Introduction In mainly oral registers, a main clause can be preceded by a complementizer in Iberian Spanish (Spitzer, 1942; Porroche Ballesteros, 1995; Garcı´a, 1996; Etxepare, 1997, in press a,b):

The apparent optionality of the complementizer masks an important semantic difference between the (a) and (b) cases in (1). As a typical declarative sentence, (1a) constitutes an assertion, whose propositional content is that a given soccer § Different parts of this research have been presented at the Symposium Syntactic Functions-Focus on the Periphery, held in Helsinki (2003), at the 2003 meeting of the project Architecture de la Phrase (Axe CP) of the Fe´deration Typologie et Universaux (CNRS), at the Spring Linguistics Meeting of the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of California Santa Barbara (2004), at the Second Vasconian Meeting on Semantics and Pragmatics in Sara (2004), at the 9th International Pragmatics Conference (2005) in Garda Lake, Italy, and finally, at the seminar Universalist Perspectives on Relative Properties: Features versus Constructions of the Clausal Left Periphery at the annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europeae, in Bremen, Germany, in 2006. I want to thank the organizers of the event, and the audience, for a very fruitful discussion of the material here. I also want to thank the group of the project ‘‘Architecture de la Phrase-Pe´riphe´rie Gauche’’ of the Fe´de´ration Typologie et Universaux of the CNRS, for continuous discussion of the matters presented here in the last years, and particularly to Georges Rebuschi, who carefully read and commented a first draft of this paper. I acknowledge financial support from that same project, directed by Alain Kihm and Hans Obenauer, as well as the project BFF2002-04238-C02-01, from the MCYT, led by Miriam Uribe-Etxebarria. All the mistakes are mine. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected].

0024-3841/$ – see front matter # 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2008.07.009

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

605

team (Barc¸a) has won the Champions League. When compared with (1a), (1b) contributes the additional meaning that someone else (who is not the speaker) said (1a), such that the (speaker’s) utterance of (1b) constitutes a report of what has been said. The two sentences would be produced in quite different settings: (1a) could be uttered for instance by someone who has been to the finals match, with the purpose of spreading the news. In such a setting, (1b) would be definitely odd. (1b), on the other hand, would be appropriate if I were listening to the radio and heard the news that Barc¸a won the Champions League. Then I could choose to report on the news by employing the Comp-initial sentence. The present paper represents an attempt to characterize more precisely the kind of grammatical object represented by the report structure in main que-clauses. As a starting point, I will consider the possibility that cases such as (1b) should be viewed as instances of hearsay evidentiality. A careful comparison between the Spanish constructions and well studied cases of hearsay evidentiality however, will show that the kind of report associated to Spanish main que-clauses cannot be subsumed under that category. The failure to do so will open the way to a different analysis. I will argue that the Spanish report constructions are instances of what have been called ‘‘quotative constructions’’ (Lord, 1993; Gu¨ldemann, 2001, for an overview): grammatical structures specialized in introducing direct or semidirect speech dependents. Quotative constructions, I will claim, express a samesaying relation, as in the davidsonian analysis of indirect speech (Davidson, 1967; Torrego and Uriagereka, 2002; Lahiri, 2002). As to the structural realization of the samesaying relation, the basic points can be summarized as follows: a. Root complementizer constructions in Spanish involve a speech eventuality, mapped in the syntactic representation of the main clause report as an indefinite description (see also Etxepare, in press a,b). This indefinite description contributes a variable ranging over utterances (a proposal that I explicitly draw from Lahiri, 2002). b. The indefinite description merges as a predicate with a propositional entity (Rizzi’s Force Phrase, 1997), forming a Small Clause (in the sense of Stowell, 1981, and subsequent work). The predication relation established between the indefinite description and the Force Phrase characterizes the latter as belonging to a higher type utterance, in Lahiri’s terms. c. This predicative relation constitutes the basic syntactic skeleton on which quotative constructions in general are based. I will suggest that one of the parameters of variation distinguishing quotative constructions across languages involves the syntactic category of the predicate in (b). The paper is organized as follows: section 2 compares the Spanish main que-clauses with hearsay evidentials, taking as a basis Faller’s (2002) careful study of the Quechuan reportative evidential. It is shown that both phenomena share a number of semantic and syntactic properties. Section 3 shows that, despite those commonalities, hearsay evidentials and Spanish que-clauses differ in several important respects, and cannot be lumped together. Section 4 introduces the proposed analysis of main que-clauses, and suggests a possible connection with so-called quotative constructions cross-linguistically. Section 5 develops the syntactic analysis introduced in the previous section. Section 6 puts the proposed analysis in a comparative perspective and suggests a way to accommodate syntactic variation in the domain of quotative constructions. Section 7 presents a remaining case of reporting main clause that does not immediately fall under the proposed analysis, and provides a minimal extension of the analysis. Section 8 concludes. 2. Hearsay evidentiality and Spanish que-clauses Functional heads and particles with a reportative function are well attested in many languages under the category of ‘‘hearsay evidentiality’’. The notion of evidentiality centers around ‘‘the sources of information or sources of knowledge behind assertions’’ (Dendale and Tasmowski, 2001:340). Evidential markers present the source of information on the grounds of which the speaker justifies a given speech act, typically an assertion (Aikhenvald, 2004).1 The source of 1 This has been called the ‘‘narrow view’’ of evidentiality (Dendale and Tasmowski, 2001). Specifying the source of information on which a given assertion relies may also result in a qualification of the speaker’s commitment to the truth of the asserted proposition. For this reason, evidentiality has sometimes been subsumed under the domain of epistemic modality (Palmer, 1986; Mithun, 1986). This view is called the ‘‘broad view of evidentiality’’. As empirical work accumulates on the subject, it seems clear that the two notions, that of epistemic modality and the one concerning the source of information behind assertions, must be kept separate as two different semantic and syntactic domains (see specially Aikhenvald, 2004; De Haan, 1999; De Lancey, 2001; Faller, 2002, 2003, 2006; Lazard, 1999), with some overlapping subareas typically related to inferential evidentiality.

606

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

information may consist of someone else’s saying, and this is what the Spanish cases would seem to convey. An illustrative example of hearsay or reportative evidentiality is provided by Cuzco Quechua –si, as studied by Faller (2002, 2003, 2006)2: (2)

Para-sha-n-si rain-prog-3-rep p=it is raining Evid: speaker was told that it is raining

In (2), the clause-final particle –si contributes the meaning that the speaker has no direct evidence for the assertion that it is raining, but bases his assertion on someone else’s saying. In this regard, it looks superficially identical to the Spanish (3), which expresses the same meaning: (3)

Que esta´ lloviendo That it-is raining p=it is raining Que= speaker was told that it is raining

2.1. Reportative evidentiality as an illocutionary operator In her detailed analysis of the quechuan reportative evidential, Faller (2002) claims that Cuzco Quechuan –si must be analyzed as an illocutionary modifier. In her terms, reportative evidentials in Cuzco Quechuan denote functions from speech acts to speech acts. They do not operate at the propositional level, but above it. The meaning contribution of –si is described as follows (Faller, 2002:200):

-Si is a function that applies to the basic speech act of Assertion, defined by the sincerity condition (SINC) that the Speaker (s) believes (BEL) the asserted proposition (p), and changes its force to that of a Presentation3. This function introduces the sincerity condition that the source of the information is someone else’s assertion (Es2[Assert(s2,p). . .), and eliminates the sincerity condition associated to the speaker of a basic assertion that the assertion is intended as true. The relevant saying is specified as not coming from either the speaker or the hearer (. . .& s2 =/=(h,s)). In support of the illocutionary modifier analysis offered in (4), Faller presents several pieces of evidence which would also apply to Spanish que-clauses. First, the reportative marker -si never occurs in those contexts which do not possess independent illocutionary force, such as conditional protases (2002:221):

Then, the reportative may take a full speech act in its scope. This can be shown with questions, when the speaker uses the reportative to ask on someone else’s behalf. Faller introduces such cases as follows (2006:14): ‘‘It has often happened in my fieldwork that I asked a question of someone without being understood. Someone else would then 2 Following Faller’s usage (2002), I separate in the glosses the meaning contribution made by the evidential (Evid) from the meaning contributed by the proposition ( p). 3 Presentation is an illocutionary point (Searle and Vanderveken, 1985) on the same level as Assertion. Faller decides to introduce a new illocutionary point Present because Assert is defined by different sincerity conditions, namely the need for the speaker to believe what he/she is asserting. This is not the case for Quechuan reportatives, as expressed in their sincerity condition SINC in the right hand of the schema.

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

607

often repeat the question using –si-. (6) would be such an example, where I address a question to the mother-in-law of one of my language consultants’’: (6)

Faller to B: Imayna-n ka-sha-nki? How-Ev be-prog-2 ‘‘How are you?’’ C (Consultant to B): Imayna-s ka-sha-nki? How-rep be-prog-2 ‘‘(She says) How are you?’’

Such uses clearly require that –si take the question in its scope. Furthermore, Faller observes that such reports are incompatible with a view of the reportative evidential as casting doubt on the truth of the proposition. The reportative evidential in Cuzco Quechua is thus not a propositional operator, but an illocutionary one. The same properties that support Faller’s analysis of the Quechuan reportative are apparent in Spanish main que-clauses too. As we will see in section 4.3 (also Etxepare, in press a), the Spanish reportative que-clauses can only occur embedded under verbs of saying and thinking which select speech acts (Lahiri, 2002; Plann, 1982; Sun˜er, 1993). Que-clauses cannot be embedded in constituents lacking independent illocutionary force, such as conditional protases (see Etxepare, in press a) or complements of factive and epistemic verbs such as saber ‘‘know’’ orcreer ‘‘believe’’. Spanish que, like the Quechuan reportative evidential, can also be used to report on someone else’s question, taking a full speech act under its scope. A mini-dialogue along the lines of (6) can be easily reproduced by means of a que-clause in Spanish: (7)

A to C: Co´mo esta´s? How are-you [Inquiring face on C] B (consultant) to C: Que co´mo esta´s That how are-you ‘‘(She/he says that) how are you?’’

(7) shows that Spanish main que-clauses can also report someone else’s speech act. 2.2. Logical restrictions on illocutionary operators 2.2.1. Disjunction The Quechuan reportative morpheme shares another important feature with Spanish main-clause que: the speech eventuality to which the reportative refers can be conjoined, but cannot be disjoined or negated. Consider in this regard the Quechuan cases in (8) (Faller, 2002:245–246): (8)

a. Ines-si utaq Juan-si llalli-sqa Ines-rep or Juan-rep win-past ‘‘Ines or Juan won’’ Evid: (i) speaker was told that Ines or Juan won (ii) #speaker was told that Ines won or speaker was told that Juan won b. Ines-qa taki-sqa dance-sqa ima-s Ines-Top sing-past dance-past and-si ‘‘Ines sang and danced’’ Evid: (i) speaker was told that Ines sang and danced (ii) speaker was told that Ines sang and speaker was told that Ines danced

Whereas conjunction allows a reading where two different illocutionary acts are involved (8b), and therefore two reports take place, disjunction only allows a single report (8a). Faller relates the Quechuan restrictions to Krifka’s

608

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

(2001) analysis of speech act operators. Krifka (2001, 2003) has recently argued that the illocutionary force of the sentence is semantically represented by a speech act operator. Speech acts can be quantified over under restrictions which turn out to be identical to the ones operating on the above constructions. Krifka shows that certain logical operations, like disjunction or negation, cannot be applied to speech acts. This is so because according to him the (denotation) domain of speech acts do not constitute a boolean algebra, but at most a semi-lattice. In that domain, certain operations such as conjunction are well defined, whereas disjunction and negation are not. Consider for instance the following assertion (from Krifka, 2001:16): (9)

Al made the pasta and Bill made the salad a. I assert: Al made the pasta and Bill made the salad b. I assert: Al made the pasta, and I assert: Bill made the salad

The conjunction operator, as shown in (9a and b), can be interpreted either as conjoining the asserted propositions or as conjoining two acts of assertion. Unlike conjunction, disjunction is only interpreted at the propositional level: (10)

Al made the pasta or Bill made the salad a. I assert: Al made the pasta or Bill made the salad b. #I assert: Al made the pasta, or I assert: Bill made the salad

Disjunction at the speech act level amounts to cancelling the illocutionary force of the sentence. The Spanish que-clauses behave as the Quechuan reportative in this regard: [Context: a waiter enters the kitchen, and addresses the cook]

2.2.2. Negation Speech acts also lack negation as a general operation (12). As Krifka notes, it is not clear what the complement of a speech act could possibly be: (12)

#I don’t assert: Al made the pasta

The Quechuan reportative evidential always takes scope over negation. Faller provides the following example (Faller, 2006:15):

In Spanish, negation is always embedded under the main clause complementizer, and falls under the scope of the report:

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

609

Interestingly, there are cases where a polarity head, like si ‘‘yes’’ can precede the root complementizer in Spanish (Etxepare, 1997; Gonsalez, 2008):

(15) is used to contradict someone else’s saying that the person in question has not arrived. A preceding saying is necessary for (15) to be felicitous. In this (15) differs from the felicity conditions of simple polarity focus:

The differing conditions in the use of polarity focus in (15) and (16) can be teased apart by the following made up context: A is meeting B in a coffee-shop. He enters the shop, looks around, but does not see B, who sits in a distant corner. B starts to make ostensible signs of frustration at the apparent absence of B. C, who is observing the scene, and who is aware that B is sitting in a place where A cannot see him, utters (17):

C could not utter (18) in the same context:

In order for (18) to be felicitous, A must say something like he didn’t come. The presence of que makes obligatory reference to a previous speech act. (15) and (16) give rise to the following asymmetry: whereas (16) shows an analogous structure with a negative polarity head (19a), (15) does not admit a negative counterpart (19b).

The asymmetry in (19) shows that the report cannot be under the scope of negation, as the Quechuan evidential, despite the fact that in Spanish, polarity operators can take scope over the report (cf. 15). 2.2.3. Summary For Faller, the Quechuan reportative evidential expresses a special type of illocutionary act, and obeys the kind of restrictions one expects from a speech act operator, according to Krifka’s thesis. The scopal restrictions shared by the Quechuan reportative evidential and the Spanish report cases suggest a common account as markers of a particular type of illocutionary act. This illocutionary act, that Faller calls Presentation, would be defined by the sincerity condition that someone else, who is neither the speaker nor the hearer, has asserted the content of the report. The illocutionary operator Presentation would then be subject to the typical restrictions of its kin. In other words, the Spanish cases would fall under a particular type of evidentiality phenomenon: one that operates at the illocutionary level.

610

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

3. Differences between reportative evidentials and Spanish que-clauses When examined in detail, however, there are important differences between reportative evidentials, of the type presented by Faller, and Spanish que-clauses. I will discuss five of them. 3.1. Speaker and hearer as sources The Quechuan reportative, according to Faller, never expresses the speaker’s or the hearer’s saying. Self-reports, however, are perfectly possible in Spanish main que-clauses. Consider in this regard the following (made-up) mini-dialogue:

In (20), the root complementizer serves to report the speaker’s own previous utterance. Note that at this point, it becomes difficult to gloss the underlying speech eventuality as a hearsay evidential, namely, as ‘‘it is said’’ or an unspecified ‘‘someone said’’. Cases where the report seems to have its source in the hearer also arise. Consider the following made up context: speaker A is making up the definite list of people who are going to Paris on a trip. A asks people one-by-one whether they are going to go or not. When A gets to speaker B, she asks the pertinent question. B answers that he is not going. A starts noting this in her name list. As she does that, she double-checks with speaker B by uttering (21): (21)

Que no vas, entonces that neg you-go, then ‘‘You say that you are not going then’’

(21) is clearly oriented towards the hearer, who is present at the moment of the utterance, and is the source of the implied speech act. This is therefore reported speech having its source in the hearer. 3.2. Scopal rigidity Another detail in which the Spanish main que-clauses and the Quechuan reportative evidential differ is in the scopal rigidity of the Spanish report construction. Whereas the reportative evidential in Quechua can be interpreted under the scope of the question, Spanish que-clauses are scopally rigid. There, the report always takes scope over the reported clause. The Quechuan case is illustrated by (22) (from Faller, 2006:13): (22)

May-manta-s chay runa ka-n-man where-abl-Rep this man be-3-Cond ‘‘Where could this man come from?’’

According to Faller, the context from which this sentence is taken ‘‘makes it clear that the speaker expects the addressee to base his answer on reportative evidence’’.4 In other words, the set of true answers of the relevant propositional form given by the hearer as a response to (22) must themselves be based on reportative evidence. As Faller suggests, the reportative evidential is understood as being under the scope of the question. The Quechuan evidential therefore, has ambiguous scope regarding the question operator: it can either be under its scope, as in (22), 4 A similar observation is made by Floyd (1999) for the hearsay evidential in Wanka Quechua, by Garrett (2001), for the hearsay evidential in Tibetan and by Lapolla (2003) for the hearsay evidential in Qiang, another language of the Tibeto-Burman family. See Aikhenvald for more cases (2004:242–256).

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

611

or scope out, as in (11). The phenomenon, as Faller herself points out, is not very different from what one finds with speech act modifiers like frankly or honestly. Speech act modifiers undergo the same type of pragmatic shift from speaker to hearer in exactly the same contexts: (23)

a. b.

Honestly/frankly, I’m tired Honestly/frankly, what do you think we should do?

(23b), unlike (23a), is most naturally interpreted as a request for the hearer to be frank or honest in her response, not as an expression of self-honesty or self-frankness in questioning. In this sense, hearsay evidentials of the Quechuan sort behave as speech act modifiers. Both types of entities are conceivably functions from speech acts to speech acts. The adverbs, unlike the reportative evidential, do not have the capacity to change the speech act type. The Spanish que-clauses show no ambiguity of this type. The question is always under the scope of the report. Only the equivalents of Quechuan (11) exist. On the other hand, speech act modifiers can not precede the root complementizer, but must necessarily follow it5:

The absence of scope interactions between the report expression and the question in Spanish is also supported by the following contrast between the Quechuan evidential and que-clauses. The reportative evidential in Quechua allows pair list readings where the terms of the list include the evidential itself. This happens in cases where the conjunction operator scopes over the question, which in turn, takes the reportative in its scope (Faller, 2002:246):

Spanish que-clauses do not allow scope interactions of this sort. The report invariably takes the question under its scope, and the terms of the list never include que:

3.3. Compatibility with clause types Aikhenvald (2004:242) notes that declarative sentences are the most natural environment for evidentials to occur, cross-linguistically. Evidentials can also occur, at least in a subset of the languages which possess an evidential system, in questions. They seem quite infrequent in commands (Aikhenvald, 2004:250). Aikhenvald does not comment on other minor clause types, such as exclamatives. In Spanish, que can precede the full range of grammatical moods 5 The relative order of complementizer and speech act adverb is relevant in view of Cinque’s claim (1999) that speech act adverbs are associated to the highest left peripheral head of the clause structure. The reportative structure must then be taken to embed Cinque’s highest projection Speech Act. See the structure in (53) in the text.

612

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

besides assertions and questions: it can precede exclamations and certain subclasses of root imperatives described by Rivero (1994). (27a,b) constitute reports of an exclamation and a command, respectively:

In other words, the report construction in Spanish can take all sorts of clause types under its scope. Typologically, this property sets Spanish que-clauses apart from evidentiality phenomena. 3.4. The assent/dissent test As evidence that the Quechua reportative evidential modifies aspects of the speech act rather than the proposition, Faller sets forth the argument that the speech eventuality implied by the reportative evidential cannot be accessed by linguistic operations bearing on propositional truth. A sentence such as (28) (Faller, 2002:195–196) can be challenged by any of (29a–c), but cannot be challenged by something like (30)6:

The speech act implied by the reportative morpheme cannot be assented to or disputed. It is beyond the propositional content. This is unlike Spanish que-clauses, where the report can be assented to or put into question:

6

This is not the case in Wanka Quechua, according to Floyd (1997:132).

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

613

So somehow, the speech eventuality associated to que-clauses must be part of the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence. I note in this regard that the report component of main que-clauses in Spanish can be independently referred to, unlike the hearsay component of evidential reportatives. Consider in this regard the following contrast:

In (32a) the silent pronominal must anaphorically anchor to something denoting an (speech) event, but there is no antecedent for it. In (32b) it is the speech eventuality introduced by que which provides the antecedent. It is the saying coming from table 15 which occurs in unison. Main que-clauses therefore contribute a speech eventuality that can be referred to. Unlike the Spanish report constructions, hearsay evidential structures do not contribute a discourse variable of the utterance type on which an anaphoric dependency can be established. The latter must be present in the Spanish cases, to account for the contrast between (32a) and (32b). 3.5. Traceability of the source speech event One additional feature that distinguishes the Quechuan reportative and the Spanish que-reports is the former’s natural occurrence in folktales and stories (Faller, 2002; Floyd, 1997), a landmark property of hearsay evidentiality. The example in (33) illustrates this use (Faller, 2002:22):

Nothing like that is possible with Spanish que-clauses, where the report cannot convey the type of general hearsay associated to folktales or stories. Unlike hearsay or reportative evidentials, the speech eventuality associated to Spanish que-reports must be traceable. It cannot be a general, impersonal saying, but must be a clear and definite one, unequivocally attributed to a given author.7 As a result, the type of report associated to main que-clauses refers to a contextually identified utterance preceding the report, in a way that is absent from hearsay evidential markers. The notion of contextually relevant utterance does not depend on the time elapsed between the original utterance and the report, but on some notion of ‘‘matter at stake’’ that links the source utterance and the report. An example can be provided by the following case. Speaker A and B share an office in a bank. At some point, A asks B to inquire about a particular transaction (whether it was already done or not). The inquiry implies moving to another office and asking the representative in that office about it. After inquiring about it, speaker B comes back and reports to speaker A:

7

This is a characterizing feature of quotative evidentiality in Aikhenvald’s terms: her typology of evidential systems distinguishes between hearsay evidentials and quotative evidentials (2004:64). I treat quotative constructions differently (see section 4; also Guldemann, 2001).

614

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

Such cases typically carry with them a feeling of relative inmediacy: A’s request must somehow be in the background for the utterance of (34) to make sense, and we can imagine that in a busy office, matters of this type cannot be in the conversational ground for a long time. However, the time/inmediacy constraint can be easily lifted. It is enough that speaker B brings back the issue for (34) to become acceptable. This may happen after, say, one year has elapsed in between the source utterance and the report:

Examples like (35) show that the crucial parameter in the felicitousness of que-clauses is not the objective temporal or spatial proximity of the reported utterance, but its traceability: the fact that we can identify the source utterance. This anaphoric property of que-clauses becomes manifest in cross-sentential dependencies, where the que-clause must be attributed to a syntactically realized antecedent, and cannot refer to a generic or impersonal saying:

Unlike hearsay evidentials, the que-clause cannot refer to a general saying or rumor (cf. the impossible meaning above), despite the fact that the sequence would yield a perfectly sensible sentence. It can only attribute the saying to a previously established discourse referent (a man in (36)). 3.6. Instructive meanings Consider now a pair like (37a,b) (Etxepare, in press a,b):

Imagine the following situation: two teenagers are secretly smoking in a room. Suddenly, fearing that his mother could show up and find out, one tells the other (36a): Si viene mi madre, el tabaco es tuyo. By saying that, the speaker asks the other person to act as if the tobacco was his or hers, if mother comes. By saying (37b), the speaker asks something more than just pretense: he or she asks the other person to say that the tobacco is his or hers. If the roommate doesn’t say so, he or she will not be complying with the speaker’s request. It is impossible to place a que-clause of this type under the general category of reportative evidentiality. (37) is not concerned with the source of the information supporting an assertion. It is an instruction, asking a hearer to say something. 3.7. Summary We have noted the following features distinguishing Spanish main que-clauses from hearsay evidentiality: (i) speaker and hearer can be sources of the report (section 3.1); (ii) the report encoded in que-clauses does not enter into

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

615

scope interactions with clausal operators (section 3.2); (iii) que, unlike hearsay evidentials, is compatible with all clause types (section 3.3); (iv) unlike the report contributed by hearsay evidentials, the report encoded by que can be accessed by linguistic operations bearing on propositional content (3.4); (v) the source utterance supporting the report must be traceable (section 3.5); and finally, (vi) the existence of instructive meanings supported by the presence of the root complementizer (section 3.6). Together, those properties provide a very different picture when compared with the type of hearsay evidential described by Faller for Quechua.8 I take this to show that the kind of report expressed by the Spanish cases must be characterized in a different way. This is the purpose of the next section. 4. Quotatives and samesaying relations 4.1. Quotative constructions Instructive meanings (as in 2.6) are typically coded in languages which make use of quotative devices, particles which frame or introduce direct and semi-direct speech. Quotative particles are clearly different in function from reportative evidential particles since, unlike them, they are typically accompanied by a matrix predicate expressing the source of the forthcoming piece of discourse. Consider for instance the following case from Svan, a kartvelian language (Boeder, 2002:22):

It is clear that the function of the quotative particle eser in (38) is not marking hearsay, since the source of the assertion is the overtly expressed subject in the introductory clause, which furthermore, is second person. Observe also that the quotative marker is not interpreted as an illocutionary modifier of the embedded assertion: that would yield an assertion of the type I have been told that I will come tomorrow, unlike in (33). Eser is one of the three quotative particles in Svan, which alternate depending on what Boeder calls ‘‘the pragmatic orientation of the quote introducer’’. Thus, a different quotative marks the quote if the source involves first person (39a) or supports an instructive meaning (39b). In the latter case, the speaker is not syntactically realized but pragmatically understood, according to Boeder. The quotative is in this case -3zˇ (from Boeder, 2002:21)9:

The quotative markers can occur just by themselves, directly introducing the quote. The fact that the same particles indicate both an instructional meaning and a first person report suggest that the notion of ‘‘source of information’’ (at least in the evidential sense) is not the organizing feature of the quotative paradigm. The fact that Spanish main clause que, unlike the Quechuan reportative, allows instructive readings suggests that the relevant feature behind the Spanish report constructions is not ‘‘source of information’’ either. In other words, that the Spanish cases do not belong in the domain of evidentiality. Let me call this other type of report structure quotative construction. Quotative constructions are a common cross-linguistic feature, and typically introduce dependents showing properties of direct or semi-direct speech (see among others, Amberber, 1996, for the semitic language Amharic; Guldemann, 2001, for a 8 This extends to the category of hearsay evidential defined in typological terms by Aikhenvald (2004). Aikhenvald sets apart a different category of reportative evidential that she calls ‘‘quotative". This type of evidential seems to be closer to the Spanish cases. For instance, Aikhenvald claims that one major difference between the two subtypes of reportative evidentiality is that in the quotative type, the source utterance is identifiable. This corresponds to the traceability requirement of the Spanish quotatives. See footnote 7. In any case, given the strict morphosyntactic definition of evidential systems provided by Aikhenvald, the Spanish cases would not constitute a case of evidential particle, but rather an "evidential strategy" (2004:11). 9 The quotative particle cliticizes to the first phrase to its right, yielding the order XP-quotative.

616

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

comprehensive view of African languages; Frajzyngier, 1996, for Chadic languages; Klamer, 2000, 2003 for Kambera, a Malayo-Polinesian language; Lord, 1993 for creole languages). 4.2. The davidsonian account of indirect speech How should we characterize quotative constructions? Let me suggest that Spanish report constructions, and plausibly quotative constructions in general, are semantically organized in terms of a samesaying relation. Samesaying relations were proposed by Davidson (1968) in the context of the logical analysis of indirect speech. He proposed that a sentence such as (40a) has a logical form like (40b): (40)

a. b.

John said that the earth is flat E(u) [said (John, u) ^ SS(u,that)]. [The earth is flat]

In the analysis proposed by Davidson (1968) (also Lepore and Loewer, 1989; Higginbotham, 1991), the utterance in (40a) is not monosentential, but an utterance of two syntactically independent sentences linked by means of a paratactic relation. The complementizer that is interpreted as a demonstrative pointing out the second term of the paratactic pair. The second utterance (the ‘‘complement’’) ‘‘is not itself an illocutionary act and thus has no force, but serves merely as a referent for the demonstrative complementizer that’’ (Hand, 1993:496). In other words, (35a) is logically equivalent to (41), a piece of direct discourse introduced by the demonstrative complement of a saying predicate10: (41)

John said this: ‘‘The earth is flat’’

The point that the paratactic clausal dependent in (39b) has no independent force, but merely serves as the referent of a demonstrative element can be related to a prominent property of quotative dependents in Spanish: they do not have independent illocutionary force either. Note in this regard the contrast between (41a), an ordinary question, and (42b), a quotative structure: (42)

a.

b.

Cua´ndo vendra´ Juan? When will-come Juan ‘‘When will Juan come?’’ Que cua´ndo vendra´ Juan that when will-come Juan ‘‘I am reporting to you the utterance of ‘when will Juan come?’’’

Whereas (42a) is necessarily a request for information and expects an answer from the hearer, (42b) is not a request for information, but a simple ‘‘letting you know’’. The utterer of (42b) may not expect an answer from me, but just let me know what another speaker has said. In the same way, a sentence such as (43b), as opposed to (43a), does not involve an actual command, but the report of a command: (43)

a.

A trabajar to work ‘‘Work’’ b. Que a trabajar that to work

Unlike (43a), (43b) can be uttered even if everyone is already working. Its purpose is just to report someone else’s saying. Obviously, both (42b) and (43b) admit a response, either linguistic (an answer) or behavioural (an action), but this is clearly a perlocutionary effect, one that follows from the possibility to trace the source of the report, which in this case may be invested with enough authority for me to start working immediately without further ado, or make me 10

On the actual grammatical realisation of the logical terms in Davidson’s analysis, there are well known reasons to be sceptic. See recently Blair (2004).

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

617

consider that a response (to the original utterance) is due. The reporter, as Faller has observed for certain uses of the reportative evidential in Quechua, is just a channel for a previous utterance. And being a channel means faithfully reproducing a previous utterance; in other words, samesaying. Intuitively, the samesaying relation also accounts for the traceability constraint associated to the Spanish report constructions. Unlike with evidentials, which only express that a given assertion is based on reportative or hearsay information, a samesaying relation needs to clearly identify the source utterance that the reporter is samesaying. A general ‘‘it is said’’, or ‘‘it got to me by hearsay’’, without a specific and identifiable source, does not allow establishing a samesaying relation. 4.3. Lahiri (2002) The quotative constructions which are the object of the present analysis can also occur embedded. The boldfaced portions in (44) represent possible main que-clause structures: (44)

Juan dice que quie´n viene Juan says that who is-coming ‘‘Juan says: ‘who is coming?’ b. Juan dice que a correr Juan says that to run ‘‘Juan says: ‘run’’’ c. Juan dice que que´ bonita es la casa Juan says that how beautiful is the house ‘‘Juan says: ‘how beautiful is the house’’’ a.

As noted by Plann (1982), the predicates which can embed quotative constructions are those which select for direct discourse complements. An illustrative example is given in (45)–(46). (45a) represents a predicate (say) that can introduce a direct discourse dependent. This direct discourse complement can be turned into indirect discourse by means of the quotative que (45b). The predicate in (46a) is a predicate that does not introduce a direct quote, and therefore it cannot select for a quotative dependent either (46b) (see Lahiri, 2002; Plann, 1982; Sun˜er, 1993, among others).

Sun˜er (1993) shows that dependents of the type of (45b) express non-propositional entities. In her terms, speech acts. She presents the following contrast:

618

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

Whereas (46a) is what Sun˜er calls a semi-question (a wh-complement which does not denote a true embedded question, but a set of propositions), (46b), with a quotative que, represents a true embedded question (an embedded request for information). (46a) describes a situation where the subject identifies the set of people who is coming. This set can be enumerated:

(46b), on the other hand, describes a situation where the subject asks who is coming. This situation does not provide a set of individuals that can be enumerated:

Lahiri (2002) proposes a semantic analysis of those complements along the lines of the davidsonian logical form. For him, as for Sun˜er, the que-clauses illustrated in (45b) exemplify a semantic type different from the propositional one. They instantiate the semantic type utterance. For Lahiri, the locus of the samesaying relation in Spanish is the complementizer que. He claims that Spanish has a special type of complementizer quequotative whose function is to take an expression of the type of questions, commands, exclamatives, declarative sentences, and yield utterances as the value. The rule that converts propositional objects into utterances is a rule of type-coercion, described as follows (2002:281): (50)

Type-coercion to utterance (mediated by que) (a) a-> iu [UTT(u,a) & C(u)] (b) -> eu

The rule in (50) changes an expression a of type (a proposition) to an individual eu of the type utterance (50b). The two-place predicate UTT is to be read as ‘‘u is an utterance of the expression a of the semantic type of a proposition’’ (50a). The effect of the existential quantification in the davidsonian formula is captured by using instead a definite description with a context variable C inside it. QueQuotative is the grammatical item which marks the proposition a as being subject to the type-shifting rule. In other words, Spanish would have a special complementizer que that denotes a function from propositions (including, according to Lahiri, questions, commands and exclamations) to utterances or speech acts. I will adopt the substance of Lahiri’s analysis for quotative dependents, departing from some of his assumptions to accommodate it to the fine syntactic details of main que-clause quotatives. First, note that que cannot be responsible of the type-shifting rule. It can occur more than once along a quotative dependent without producing further typeshiftings (see Uriagereka, 1988; Demonte and Soriano, 2008).11 The following example from the Corpus of the Royal Academy (CREA) shows a sequence of three complementizers, bracketing various types of left peripheral elements (from Alvaro Pombo’s El he´roe de las Mansardas de Mansard, p.130):

The different complementizers in (51) are associated to a single report. Complementizer iteration of the sort in (51) only occurs in quotative clauses. I will suggest that rather than marking a type-shifting operation, the complementizer is a clausal determiner, introducing the quantification over utterances proposed by Lahiri and Davidson. It has been argued that complementizers play in the clausal domain the same role as determiners in the nominal domain 11

This would be analogous to cases of ‘‘quotative spreading’’ occurring in several languages possessing quotative constructions (see Boeder, 2002 for Georgian, and Guldemann, 2001).

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

619

(Szabolcsi, 1994; Ogawa, 2001). Determiners have, among other functions, a discourse-related role, constraining or introducing discourse variables in a textual domain (Heim, 1982). We have already seen that main que-clauses introduce discourse antecedents for pronominal anaphora (32b). Following Lahiri’s formulation, I will claim that que represents the iota operator in the logical formula in (50).12 Let us call this a Clausal Determiner: (52)

[DP que [. . .]]

If the complementizer is not a type shifter, but actually the grammatical projection of the iota-operator, we must consider the possibility of fully expressing Lahiri’s basic analysis in syntactic terms. Note that the samesaying relation cannot crucially involve the matrix verb of saying, since main que-clauses are just that, main clauses. UTT is thus a predicate that relates two terms: on the one hand, the propositional object (declarative, interrogative, exclamative or otherwise); on the other the utterance variable itself, an element which categorizes or defines the propositional object as an ‘‘utterance’’, and that I will call the Quotative Predicate. Let me express this intuition in abstract syntactic terms, by means of a Small Clause: (53)

[RelP [Force Phrase] [RelP Rel0 [Quotative Predicate]]]

(53) makes syntactically explicit the predication relation between the UTT predicate and the two terms. I follow Den Dikken’s (2006) analysis of Small Clause structures as fundamentally asymmetrical configurations.13 The Relator, in Den Dikken’s terms, is a place-holder for any head that articulates the predication relation in the Small Clause. The Relator in (53) corresponds to the UTT function in (50a), and takes a complement, the Quotative Predicate, and a subject, the propositional entity, that I describe in categorial terms as a Force Phrase (Rizzi, 1997). (53) says that the Force Phrase must be understood as an ‘‘utterance’’. This utterance is contextually restricted by the complementizer, which has anaphoric properties. Putting together (51) and (53) we get (54), the basic skeleton of Spanish quotative constructions14: (54)

[CP/DP que [RelP [Force Phrase] [Relator0 [Quotative Predicate]]]

5. The Spanish quotative predicate 5.1. The predicate as a saying event Assuming (54) is the basic syntactic skeleton for the Spanish quotative clause, we will now try to characterize in more precise terms the Quotative Predicate in (54). Let us start with the following contrast:

12 This does not account for the iteration of the complementizers. Paoli (2003) in her study of the CP system of various Italian varieties, identifies one which is very close to the Spanish one: in Neapolitan Italian, Complementizers also seem to be able to iterate indefinitely, under conditions which resemble the Spanish case. Paoli suggests that the iterated complementizers mark the different topic heads, following Rizzi’s expanded CP-structure (1997). This idea faces the problem that what the spreading complementizers follow is not always a topic. It can be an addressee oriented particle like oye ‘listen’, as in (1) below: (i) Ricardo que oye, que los invitados finalmente no vienen Ricardo that listen that the invitees finally neg come ‘‘Ricardo, listen, the invitees finally are not coming’’ Que=speaker reports someone else’s saying Demonte and Soriano (2008), on the other hand, take Complementizer iteration to mark the upper and the lower Complementizer in Rizzi’s expanded CP (Rizzi, 1997). The highest Complementizer would represent Rizzi’s Force head, while the second one, immediately preceding the IP, would represent the Finiteness head. The problem with this account is that iteration of Complementizers in Spanish is not limited to two, as witnessed in the example from the CREA. This problem extends to other cartographic proposals like Uriagereka’s (1995). Complementizers can spread indefinitely across the left periphery in quotative constructions, under conditions which are not well understood. I leave this matter for future research. 13 This view of Small Clauses is opposed to the one that views Small Clauses as symmetric structures (see recently Moro, 2000; Pereltsvaig, 2001). 14 This proposal is similar in spirit to Torrego and Uriagereka (2002). See also Etxepare (1997).

620

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

In (55), the report associated to the clause can be modified by event-modifying PPs. The reading in all cases is one where the saying (that Bush is going to attack Iran) is modified. This saying can occur through CNN, in Al-Jazeera, broadcasted directly from the White House or be intended for the whole world. In any case, it is a speech event that is being modified. None of this is possible with ordinary assertions:

The PP modifiers can precede the quotative clause:

The PPs in (56)–(57) can only be interpreted as modifying an underlying saying. The grammatical object that represents the saying must be such that it can be modified by PPs. 5.2. Number agreement It is well known (Picallo, 2002) that Spanish finite clauses headed by que have a negative specification for phifeatures. They don’t trigger agreement in gender, number or person. Consider in this regard (58):

A conjunction of two que-clauses cannot trigger plural number agreement in the finite verb, showing that they are not specified for number. Compare (58) to (59):

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

621

(59) presents a conjunction of two que-clauses with an event-reading (one involving a saying). Agreement is in this case, obligatory.15 Since que-clauses by themselves do not agree in number there must be something else that triggers this agreement. It is natural to relate the presence of number to what makes quotative constructions special from a semantic point of view: the presence of an underlying saying. Let me therefore add that besides allowing PPmodification, this underlying saying must also possess number features in its syntactic representation. 5.3. Cataphoric constructions with quotative clauses A possibility would be that the predicate be a silent pronominal. This would approach main-clause quotatives to the possessive constructions in (60), where a clitic pronoun cataphorically refers to a quotative clause:

(60) is a nominal predicational structure containing a clitic predicate (a DP, see Torrego, 1985; Uriagereka, 1995) which has undergone predicate inversion. Predicate inversion is preceded by movement of the inner Relator head (de) into the Linker (que), yielding the complex head deque: (61)

a. b. c.

[LinkP que [RelP [cua´ndo venı´as] de [DP lo pro]] [LinkP de+que [RelP [cua´ndo venı´as] de [DP lo pro]] [LinkP [DP lo pro] de+que [RelP [cua´ndo venı´as] de [DP lo pro]]

Evidence in favor of this derivation is given by the fact that the sequence deque in (62) cannot be split: (62)

*Lo de [que cua´ndo venı´as] y [que cua´nto tiempo te quedabas] lo dijo Pedro Cl of that when you-came and that how-much time cl you-stayed cl said Pedro

The basic predication relation in (61a) is akin to the one argued for by Moro (1997) regarding structures like (63) (Den Dikken, 2006:69): (63)

a. b.

It is that Imogen left [Cop be [RelP [that Imogen left] Rel0 it]]]

Indirect evidence that the structure of (60) corresponds to an inner nominal predication as in (63) comes from comparison with cases where lo is a bona fide determiner heading the whole complement. Lo in Spanish can either be a clitic pronoun or an article. In cases like (64), it is clearly a neuter article:

In (64) there is no obvious source for a clitic pronoun (what follows lo is an adjective), and the whole phrase is headed by a preposition, which selects a DP. Lo in those cases can be taken to nominalize the property denoted by the adjective. In (64), it makes reference to the property of being good. The DP lo bueno ‘‘the good thing’’, can in turn be followed by a de que phrase:

15

Singular agreement is possible, but then, to my ear, the interpretation is that of a single saying, one whose content is the conjunction of the two que-clauses.

622

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

Crucially, these cases do not involve a cataphoric relation: rather (as the translation shows), the finite clause introduced by de que contributes the thing about which the lo-phrase says something. The aboutness topic contributed by the de que clause becomes more salient with the addition of the preposition acerca ‘‘about’’:

The structure in (66) is in stark contrast with the cataphoric case in (60). The latter does not present an aboutness reading for the quotative dependent, it does not admit an overt restriction for the pronoun lo (67a), and does not license an overt preposition like acerca ‘‘about’’ (67b):16

Furthermore, there is also a difference as to the syntactic status of the de que sequence: the sequence cannot be split in cataphoric constructions, but it can in the aboutness cases, as witnessed in (68).

Those differences indirectly show that the cataphoric cases are not headed by lo. If this is the case, lo must have been generated below the de que sequence. This sequence, furthermore, seems to form a complex head in the cataphoric cases, unlike the de que sequences of aboutness structures. The derivation in (61) provides a rationale for those otherwise disparate properties. 5.4. The nature of the nominal predicate There is at least one big problem to identify quotative constructions with an underlying structure like (61a). Besides the fact that quotative constructions do not show the overt morphology related to the structure in (61a), the cataphoric cases in (60) cannot constitute an out of the blue report. There are dramatic differences in the pragmatic use of main que-clauses and the structure illustrated in (60). I cannot enter a room and directly report on someone else’s saying by uttering (70):

Still, I take the basic predication structure formed by the cataphoric construction in (61) to constitute an appropriate basis for the analysis of the quotative construction. What the differences between the two constructions tell us is that, whatever the nominal element occupying the predicate slot in the quotative construction, it cannot be a pronominal element. We saw that it must have three properties: (i) it must make reference to a saying event that can be modified by event PP-modifiers (section 5.1); (ii) it must involve number features (section 5.2); and (iii) it cannot be pronominal (section 5.3). Let me propose that the relevant predicative term here is a result noun, in the sense of Grimshaw (1990), something like a saying. This null predicate undergoes predicate inversion to the specifier of the clausal determiner que, yielding the silent equivalent of a saying that [. . .]:

16

(67b) is grammatical with an aboutness reading.

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

(71)

623

a.. . .que [RelP [Force Phrase] Rel0 [NumP a saying]] -> b.. . .Rel0+que [RelP [Force Phrase] Rel0 [NumP a saying]] -> c.[[a saying] Rel0+que [[Force Phrase] Rel0 [NumP a saying]]]

This silent nominal accounts for number agreement and for the saying event underlying que-quotatives. 5.5. Properties of the report as represented in the quotative structure If we look at the properties that distinguish our quotative constructions from hearsay evidentiality (section 3), we can see that the relevant properties follow naturally from the syntactic structure represented in (71). Consider (71c), repeated below: (71)

c.[[a saying] Rel0+que [[Force Phrase] Rel0 [NumP a saying]]]

Since the saying is present in the grammatical representation of the quotative construction as a predicate, it can be the object of assent or dissent, and it can be referred to (section 3.4). The anaphoric properties of the clausal determiner que, whose projection hosts the saying predicate, ensure that the source speech event be a traceable one (section 3.5). Since the report is a predicate in a structure having the maximal propositional object (the Force Phrase) as its subject, there cannot be any scope interactions between clausal operators belonging in Force Phrase and the report (section 3.2), and the compatibility of the report with all clause types follows from the kind of syntactic entity which constitutes the subject of the quotative predication, namely a Rizzian Force Phrase (section 3.3). All five properties characterizing quotative constructions in Spanish thus follow naturally from the derived structure in (71c). 6. The relator phrase as the source of variation The basic structure underlying the quotative construction in Spanish can be thought of as a general basic skeleton for quotative constructions cross-linguistically. (71a) establishes a predication relation between a clause and a predicate referring to a speech event. Let me call this predicate the ‘‘quotative-XP’’. This predication is mediated by an independent Relator in (71a), but it can be directly realized by canonical predicates representing speech eventualities. For instance, in what Gu¨ldemann (2002) calls clausal ‘‘bisected’’ quotative constructions, verbs of speech introducing quotes are doubled by a quotative marker which is itself of verbal nature, yielding a verb-doubling structure. Consider in this regard the following pair from Kanuri (Gu¨ldemann, 2001:97)17:

Cases like the one illustrated in (72b) are treated in the literature as instances of verb omission, a widespread phenomenon in doubling structures of the quotative type (see also Amberber, 1996, for Amharic; and Frayjzingier, 1996 for Chadic languages). (72b) shows that the doubling grammatical item, in this case a (partially) inflected verb, has the means to characterize by itself (without the help of the matrix verb) what follows as an utterance. The doubling cases, as well as the ‘‘verb omission’’ cases are not that different from the Spanish embedded and main-clause instances of quotative que:

17

QV is for Quotative Verb. MED goes for Medial Verb.

624

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

In (72b), the partially inflected quotative verb occupies the syntactic slot corresponding to the Quotative Predicate in structure (53): (74)(Ali yesterday told me:) [Small Clause [Quote] s3] Other elements which can occupy predicative positions also occur as quotative predicates, for instance manner deictics (equivalents of thus) or prepositional phrases (like this) (see Guldemann, 2001). A frequently reported case is that of European quotative constructions of the be like or go like sort. The manner component itself can be inserted in a morphosyntactically richer predicational structure. A case in point seems to be the oceanic Malaita language Kwaio (Keesing, 1985, apud Guldemann, 2001:252):

In Kwaio, the deictic demonstrative oo ‘‘thus’’ is embedded under the copula ilo ‘‘be’’. The quote follows the structure. Ilo ‘‘be’’ would be the overt realization of the Relator in the underlying structure in (76), itself preceded by the verb fata ‘‘speak’’18: (76)

. . .[RelP [Quote] [Rel’ be [Dem thus]]]

The predicate position can also be occupied by nominals referring to a speech event. This is the case in Tuvaluva, a malayo-polinesian language (Besnier, 1992), where the quotative predicate consists of a possessive phrase containing a noun meaning ‘‘word’’ and a possessor referring to the speaker of the quote (apud Guldemann, 2001:61):

The predicative position can also be occupied by an open sentence, as in the clause doubling cases in German (78a) noted by Guldemann (2001) and some varieties of iberian Spanish (78b) (example from the CREA):

The basic predicative structure in these cases involves an open sentence with a quotative operator (Collins, 1997). (79)

. . .[[quote] [CPOp C [TP he says (Op)]]

In other words, the predicative position can be occupied by a wide range of grammatical phrases performing a predicative function. This may include verbs (finite or non-finite), manner demonstratives and prepositional phrases, noun phrases and CPs headed by an operator: (80)

18

a.. . .[RelP [Quote] [VP]] b.. . .[RelP [Quote] [PP]] c.. . .[RelP [Quote] Rel0 [NP/DP]] d.. . .[RelP [Quote]i Rel0 [Opi C IP]]

I assume that movement of the Relator and the demonstrative to the left periphery of the predicative construction accounts for the final position of the quote.

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

625

7. Instructive meanings We concluded in section 3.6 that instructive meanings such as (36b), repeated below, were incompatible with an analysis of Spanish main que-clauses as evidential strategies of the hearsay type:

Instructive que-clauses require the addressee to perform a linguistic act. It is not clear how to represent that aspect of the meaning of instructive cases with the structure in (71c). The relevant syntactic representation of instructive cases must therefore involve a more complex structure. There is one crucial property that distinguishes instructive meanings from simple que-clauses, and this property suggests precisely that the relevant structure in those cases is richer than in simple reportative contexts. Instructive quotatives can be modified by adverbs:

Here the adverb modifies the underlying speech eventuality. But it does so by using a category which typically modifies verbal structures, and not nominal structures. Somewhere in the syntactic representation of instructive quotatives, there must be a verb. Comparative evidence can be brought in that confirms this correlation. Standard Georgian, for instance, distinguishes simple quotatives (marked by –o) from instructive meanings of the sort in (81) which are marked by the complex quotative-particle –tko. As Boeder puts it, -tko ‘‘is a particle used when the speaker is instructing the addressee to transmit the quote to somebody’’ (2002:13). He provides the following illustrative example:

The particle –tko, unlike the quotative particle –o used in non instructive contexts, is derived from tkv-a, the second person singular subjunctive of the verb tkv- ‘‘say’’. It seems as if instructive meanings require an overt person marker, and that at least in kartvelian languages this goes together with a grammaticalized finite verbal structure. Together with a general purpose quotative marker –o, and an instructive –tko, standard Georgian also has a particular quotative which introduces first person reports: -metki (Boeder, 2002:14).

-metki is transparently a simplified form of me v-tkv-i (1s-say-aor ‘‘I said’’). Both –tko and –metki can introduce quotations by themselves (Boeder, 2002:16–17). The normal understood subject of the Spanish instructive cases is undoubtedly the second person or addressee. But we can also construct cases where the pragmatic orientation is towards the speaker himself, like the Georgian first person reports. Consider for instance a situation where one of the furtive smokers in (36b) is by himself. He is trying to anticipate his behaviour in case mother comes and finds out, and he decides that he will tell her that the tobacco is not really his. He could express this thought by means of the following sentence: (84)

Esto es lo que hare´. Cuando entre mi madre, ra´pidamente que el tabaco es This is cl what I-ll-do when enters my mother, rapidly that the tobacco is de Pedro of Pedro ‘‘This is what I’ll do. When mother comes in I will say rapidly that the tobacco is Pedro’s’’

626

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

How should we characterize syntactically the speaker of (81) and (84)? It cannot be pro, under a traditional approach to pro-licensing in Spanish. Note that there is no finite morphology which would identify pro. The simplest structure we can think of in this case is a control structure. Let me therefore suggest the following partial structure: (81)

. . .[vP (PRO) v [. . .quotative dependent. . .]]]

I will not pursue the matter further. I will also leave aside for the moment the issue of how the verbal structure merges to the rest of the quotative constructions. Those matters are fully addressed in Etxepare (2008a,b). 8. Conclusions In this paper, I attempted to analyze, both syntactically and semantically, some main clause constructions in Iberian Spanish headed by a root Complementizer. The relevant constructions contribute a report to the ordinary denotation of simple clauses. I proposed that those structures are actually Small Clauses with a silent nominal predicate. The Small Clause represents a predication relation between a propositional object (a Force Phrase, in the sense of Rizzi, 1997) and a predicate which denotes an utterance variable (Lahiri, 2002) and which characterizes the FP as belonging to a non-propositional type utterance. This analysis owes much to Davidson’s (1968) original paratactic theory of finite dependents. On top of this predication relation is a Complementizer with anaphoric properties (que), which hosts predicate inversion (Den Dikken, 2006), and anchors the utterance variable in the previous discourse. I set the Spanish constructions in a wider context, by comparing them to other report constructions. By so doing, I showed the differences holding between the kinds of report associated to que-constructions and seemingly close cases of reportative evidentiality. I claimed that the Spanish cases should be assimilated to so-called quotative constructions (Lord, 1993; Gu¨ldemann, 2001), grammatical structures which frame or introduce direct and semi-direct speech, and proposed a syntactic basis for this construction that can accommodate cross-linguistic differences. References Aikhenvald, A., 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford University Press. Amberber, M., 1996. Transitivity alternations, event types and light verbs. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, McGill University, Canada. Blair, D., 2004. Parataxis and logical form. Unpublished Dissertation, University of Connecticut. Boeder, W., 2002. Speech and thought representation in the Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages, in: Gu¨ldemann, T., von Roncador, M. (Eds.), pp. 3–49. Cinque, G., 1999. Adverbs and functional heads. A crosslinguistic perspective. In: Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Collins, C., 1997. Local Economy. MIT Press, Massachusetts, [Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 29]. Davidson, D., 1967. On saying that. In: Reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Demonte, V., Soriano, O.F., 2008. La periferia izquierda oracional y los complementantes del espan˜ol. Ms. Universidad Auto´noma de Madrid. Dendale, P., Tasmowski, L., 2001. Introduction: evidentiality and related notions. Journal of Pragmatics 33, 339–348. Den Dikken, M., 2006. Relators and Linkers. The Syntax of Predication, Predicate Inversion, and Copulas. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 47. MIT Press, Cambridge. De Haan, F., 1999. Evidentiality and epistemic modality: setting boundaries. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 18, 83–102. De Lancey, S., 2001. The mirative and evidentiality. Journal of Pragmatics 33, 369–382. Etxepare, R., 1997. On the grammatical representation of speech events. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland. Etxepare, R., in press a. On quotative constructions in Iberian Spanish, in: Laury, R., Seeppanen, E.-L. (Eds.), The Pragmatics of Clause Combining. Typological Studies in Language Series, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Etxepare, R., in press b. Some aspects of the quotative construction in Iberian Spanish. International Journal of Basque Language and Linguistics. Faller, M., 2002. Semantics and pragmatics of evidentials in Cuzco Quechua. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford. Floyd, R., 1997. La Estructura categorical de los evidenciales en el quechua Wanka. Insituto Lingu¨´ıstico de Verano, Lima. Frajzyngier, Z., 1996. Grammaticalization of the complex sentence. A case study in Chadic. In: Studies in Language Companion Series 32, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Garcı´a, E., 1996. Co´mo que que´? Hispanic Linguistics 8, 59–93. Gonsalez, R., 2008. La Polaridad Positiva en Espan˜ol. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Gu¨ldemann, T., 2001. Quotative Constructions in African Language. A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey. Leipzig University, Habilitationschrift. Gu¨ldemann, T., 2002. When ‘say’ is not say: the functional versatility of the Bantu quotative marker ti with special reference to Shona. In: Gu¨ldemann, T., von Roncador, M. (Eds.), Reported Discourse. A Meeting Ground for Different Linguistic Domains. Typological Studies in Language 52. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 253–288. Hand, M., 1993. Parataxis and parentheticals. Linguistics and Philosophy 16, 495–507. ?

R. Etxepare / Lingua 120 (2010) 604–627

627

Higginbotham, J., 1991. Belief and logical form. Mind and Language 6, 344–369. Keesing, R.M., 1985. Kwaio grammar. Pacific Linguistics B88. Australian National University, Canberra. Klamer, M., 2000. How report verbs become quote markers and complementizers. Lingua 110, 69–98. Klamer, M., 2003. Report constructions in Kambera (Austronesian). In: Gu¨ldemann, T., von Roncador, M. (Eds.), Reported Discourse. A Meeting Ground for Different Linguistic Domains. Typological Studies in Language 52. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 323–340. Krifka, M., 2001. Quantifying into question acts. Natural Language Semantics 9–1, 1–40. Krifka, M., 2003. Quantifiers in questions. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 3, 449–526. Lahiri, U., 2002. Questions and Answers in Embedded Contexts. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lapolla, R., 2003. Evidentiality in Qiang. In: Aikhenvald, A.Y., Dixon, R.M.W. (Eds.), Studies in Evidentiality. Typological Studies in Language 54. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 63–78. Lazard, G., 1999. Mirativity, evidentiality, mediativity, or other? Linguistic Typology 3, 91–110. Lepore, E., Loewer, B., 1989. You can say that again. In: French, P., Uehling, T., Wettstein, H. (Eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy XIV: Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language II. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame. Lord, C., 1993. Historical change in serial verb constructions. In: Typological Studies in Language 26, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Ogawa, Y., 2001. A unified theory of verbal and nominal projections. In: Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax, Oxford University Press. Paoli, S., 2003. Comp and the left periphery: comparative evidence from romance. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Manchester. Picallo, C., 2002. Abstract agreement and clausal arguments. Syntax 5, 116–147. Plann, S., 1982. Indirect questions in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry 13, 297–312. Porroche Ballesteros, M., 1995. Algunos aspectos del uso de que en el espan˜ol conversacional (que como introductor de oraciones ‘independientes’. Atti del XXI Congreso Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Romanza. Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani. Universita` di Palermo 18–24 septembre 1995, vol. II, G. Rufino (Ed.), pp. 245–255. Rizzi, L., 1997. The Fine structure of the left periphery. In: Haegeman, L. (Ed.), Elements of Grammar. Kluwer, Dordrecht. Rivero, M.-L., 1994. On indirect questions, commands and Spanish quotative que. Linguistic Inquiry 25, 547–554. Searle, J., Vanderveken, D., 1985. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Spitzer, L., 1942. Notas sinta´ctico-estilı´sticas a propo´sito del espan˜ol que. Revista de Filologı´a Hispa´nica 4, 105–126. Stowell, T., 1981. Origins of phrase structure. Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT, Massachusetts. Sun˜er, M., 1993. About indirect questions and semi-questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 16, 45–78. Torrego, E., Uriagereka, J., 2002. Parataxis. In: Uriagereka, J. (Ed.), Exploring the Dynamics of Syntax, Routledge Leading Linguists. Routledge, London. Uriagereka, J., 1995. An F position in romance. In: Kiss, K. (Ed.), Discourse Configurational Languages. Oxford University Press, Oxford.