Verbum dicendi
If a complement of a verbum dicendi is direct speech, it is presented as a faithful report of what the original speaker exactly said.
For example, Negative Polarity Items (NPI) inside an embedded direct quote cannot be licensed by a syntactic element in the matrix clause.(3)a.
[2]Note that (3)a is still syntactically well-formed but cannot communicate the same meaning as (3)b, in which the NPI anything inside the embedded indirect quote [they had seen anything] is licensed by nobody in the matrix clause.
[3] Such examples are prototypical, but many variants exist within an open class of manner-of-speaking verbs, such as ask, shout, scream, wonder, yell, holler, bellow, grunt, mumble, mutter, etc.
These may be considered semantically more specific, implying a clause type (as in ask) or indicating the intensity or prosody of the reported material (e.g. shout, mutter).
[3] Written English often employs manner-of-speaking verbs or verba dicendi in conjunction with quotation marks to demarcate the quoted content.
Speakers use more subtle phonetic and prosodic cues like intonation, rhythm, and mimesis to indicate reported speech.
There are numerous syntactically and semantically relevant properties of verba dicendi and manner-of-speaking verbs, several of which are highlighted below: i.
Some manner-of-speaking verbs may have a nominal (noun) counterpart which sounds the same, but which has no communicative content, such as mutter, bellow, shriek, whine and whisper.
Another property of verbs of speaking is the lack of so-called factivity effect; in other words, the speaker is not required to actually believe what they are saying.
[6] The syntax of quotation and verba dicendi appears at first glance to be a straightforward case of transitivity, in which the quoted material is interpreted as a direct object.
This analysis is supported by some of the typical syntactic tools for testing direct objects, such as moving into the focus of a question and clefting.
[3] However, constituency, movement and replacement tests show that the quotative clause does not behave like a normal transitive construction.
For example, clefting and passivization of these forms give marked (ungrammatical, or strange at least) results: Quotation may also be less restricted than ordinary transitive verbs.
[7] Note that the asymmetry arises from the fact that the reporting clause is dependent on the quoted content for grammaticality, while the reverse is not true.
[7] Verbs of speaking often employ the Conversational Historical Present tense, whereby actions in the past are referred to with present-tense morphology.
[3] Sentences with verba dicendi for direct quotation may use the somewhat antiquated verb-first (V2) order of English syntax.
Say may also function as an interjection to either focus attention on the speaker or to convey some emotional state such as surprise, regret, disbelief, etc.
[12][13] Historically, use of と -to was restricted to reporting a statement by another speaker, but it has a much wider distribution in modern Japanese.
[15][16] In the above construction, the underlined phrase headed by {と -to, って -tte} can be a word, a clause, a sentence, or an onomatopoetic expression.
[13] In Japanese, a complement of a verbum dicendi can be ambiguous between direct and indirect readings, meaning that the distinction can only be inferred from the discourse context.
[13] 太郎 は 僕 が 東京 へ 行く と 言った。Taroo wa [boku ga Tookyoo e ik-u] to it-taTaro TOP I(MASC) NOM Tokyo to go-PRS QUOT say-PST.(2)a.
[12] One language-specific diagnostics of direct speech is so-called "addressee-oriented expressions,"[16] which trigger a presupposition that there is an addressee in the discourse context.
Some examples are listed below:sentence final particles: さ -sa 'let me tell you'; ね -ne 'you know'; よ -yo 'I tell you'; わ -wa 'I want you to know'imperative forms: 「走れ！」hashire 'Run!’polite verbs/polite auxiliary verbs: です desu; ございます gozaimasu; ますmasu[16][12]For example, in (3), [Ame da yo] in the complement of the verb 言う iu (past tense: itta) is unambiguously interpreted as direct speech because of the sentence final particle よ -yo 'I tell you'.
It is a gender-neutral pronoun that uniformly refers to "the private self,"[13] or an agent of thinking, as opposed to "the public self," an agent of communicating, expressed by various personal pronouns (e.g. 僕 boku 'I(MALE)'), occupational roles (e.g. 先生 sensei 'teacher'), and kinship terms (e.g. お母さん okaasan 'mother').
[13] 太郎 は 自分 が 東京 へ 行く と 言った。Tarooi wa [zibuni ga Tookyoo e iku] to it-taTaro TOP self NOM Tokyo to go QUOT say-PST.
[1]Q太郎 は 奴の うちに 何時に 来い と 言った の か。Taroi wa [yatui-no uti-ni nanzi-ni ko-i] to it-ta no ka?
[1]Taro TOP [he-GEN house-DAT what.time-DAT come-IMP] QUOT say-PST Q Q'What time did Taroi say, [come to hisi house ______]?
On the other hand, the third person pronoun 奴 yatu 'he' inside the embedded clause is co-referential with the matrix subject 太郎 Taro.
[1] This means that this deictic expression inside the embedded clause is interpreted in the context in which the whole sentence (6) is uttered; cross-linguistically, this is considered to be a property of indirect speech.
