A SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF WRITTEN ENGLISH QUOTATIVES
JESSICA SAMS
PhD thesis, University of Colorado, 2008
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This dissertation examines the three-tiered relationship among form, function, and
genre in the domain of written English quotatives and proposes a model for representing the
syntactic relationship between quotatives and quotations. Quotatives in written language
serve a variety of functions, from providing supporting evidence for a claim to illustrating
the emotional states of characters. These functions are achieved through the use of formal
features, such as adverb use, modification of the speaker-argument, non-prototypical quoting
verbs, and coordinate structures. This study is based on analysis of 2612 quotative tokens
collected from three written genres–fiction books, newspapers, and tabloids. Each quotative
token was annotated for specific syntactic, lexical, and discourse-based features, such as
position, inversion, quoting verb, morphological expression of the speaker-argument, and
discourse status of the speaker-argument. The analysis focuses on syntactic and lexical
phenomena that are challenging for current syntactic theories, including the seemingly
unlimited range of quoting verbs used by authors to enliven narratives, the variety of
positions in which quotatives appear relative to the quoted material, and the potential for
quotatives to be verb-initial. I argue that syntactic and semantic relationships between
quotatives and quotations are the products of constructions, some of which determine the
order of the quotative relative to the quoted speech and some of which create the possibility
of using quoting verbs that do not intrinsically denote speech acts (e.g., explode, snap).
JESSICA SAMS
PhD thesis, University of Colorado, 2008
Download
This dissertation examines the three-tiered relationship among form, function, and
genre in the domain of written English quotatives and proposes a model for representing the
syntactic relationship between quotatives and quotations. Quotatives in written language
serve a variety of functions, from providing supporting evidence for a claim to illustrating
the emotional states of characters. These functions are achieved through the use of formal
features, such as adverb use, modification of the speaker-argument, non-prototypical quoting
verbs, and coordinate structures. This study is based on analysis of 2612 quotative tokens
collected from three written genres–fiction books, newspapers, and tabloids. Each quotative
token was annotated for specific syntactic, lexical, and discourse-based features, such as
position, inversion, quoting verb, morphological expression of the speaker-argument, and
discourse status of the speaker-argument. The analysis focuses on syntactic and lexical
phenomena that are challenging for current syntactic theories, including the seemingly
unlimited range of quoting verbs used by authors to enliven narratives, the variety of
positions in which quotatives appear relative to the quoted material, and the potential for
quotatives to be verb-initial. I argue that syntactic and semantic relationships between
quotatives and quotations are the products of constructions, some of which determine the
order of the quotative relative to the quoted speech and some of which create the possibility
of using quoting verbs that do not intrinsically denote speech acts (e.g., explode, snap).