Reported Speech in Lisu and Burmic

Abstract

The embedding of reported speech in discourse is universal; it is often one element in an evidential system. Interestingly, the reported speech forms within evidential systems differ widely across Burmic languages. In Lisu, there is a clause-final reported speech evidential or hearsay marker jo: /dʐo21/, which is by far the most frequently-occurring evidential marker in the language. This has dialect forms including Northern Lisu /dʒo21/ and Southern Lisu /dzo21/ and /do21/. A second frequent way of embedding reported speech in Lisu is to have a preceding verb of speaking or cognition/perception, most frequently bA /bæ44/ 'say', in a nominalised nonfinal clause ending in the topic/conditional marker ny /ɲɑ44/ as in yi. bA_ m ny [quote] /ji55 bæ44ɑ44 mɑ44 ɲɑ44 [quote]/ 'What he said was [quote]'. Alternatively, a quote can be preceded by speaker and/or addressee NPs without a verb, followed by the topic/conditional marker ny /ɲɑ44/; or by a simple non-nominalised verb clause such as yi. bA_ /ji55 bæ44ɑ44/ 'He said [quote]'. No modification to pronoun or other forms within the quotation is required, unlike for example with indirect speech in English. A third extremely frequent way is to make the quotation into a complement of a following short main clause with a speaking or cognition verb. In Lisu, the complementiser be /be44/ directly follows the quotation, and then there is a short clause with a verb of speaking, again most often bA, as in [quote] be nuY tA. bA_ lo [quote] /be44 nu33 tæ55 bæ44ɑ44 lo44/ '(Someone) said to you that [quote]'; many other speaking verbs are possible. For the verb bA only, as long as there are no NPs preceding the verb in the postquote clause, the presence of the complementiser be is variable and infrequent. Often the second and the third embedding strategies are combined, or less frequently all three, with the evidential reported speech marker in final position, like yi. nu tA. bA_ m ny [quote] be bA_ lo jo: /ji55 nu33 tæ55 bæ44ɑ44 mɑ44 ɲɑ44 [quote] be44 bæ44ɑ44 lo44 dʐo21/ 'It is said that what he said to you is that [quote]'. A fourth possibility is to embed speech within discourse without any overt marking that the speech is quoted; in oral narrative, the speaker may adopt a different voice for the quoted passage. This is particularly frequent where a long series of quotations of dialogue occurs, as in narrative. The evidential jo: is frequent in Lisu traditional genres, including archaic songs and proverbs and modern narrative and conversation; unlike other evidential and epistemic markers, it can also occur after another evidential or epistemic form to give hearsay evidence about the source of knowledge and/or degree of certainty. The speaker is less committed to the accuracy of the reported speech when using this evidential than with the other quotationembedding strategies. The Lisu reported speech evidential has likely cognates in closely-related Ngwi languages, such as Lahu cev /tʃe54/ and Akha jev /dʑe55/, all related to Proto-Ngwi *jay2 (Bradley 1979a etymon 861). Literary Burmese and modern spoken Burmese have completely different clause-final reported speech markers, literary hu /hu44/ and spoken lui≥ /lo44/ or t´≥ /tɛ44/. This indicates that these forms may change relatively rapidly, as is often the case with evidential and other grammatical marking. Nevertheless, the overall syntactic patterns are similar, with interesting minor differences.