A syntactic analysis of written English quotatives.

摘要

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).