Abstract:

Direct speech is commonly assumed to be a typological universal, defined in terms of faithful, or verbatim, reproduction of an original utterance.

In practice, however, the notion of ”verbatim” does not apply in the same way across languages, cultures, and genres.

For example, speech in a foreign language may be translated when reported in some situations but not in others. Furthermore, characteristic dialectal and stylistic features may be introduced or omitted depending on generic conventions or the specific narrator’s goals.

To assess the scope of cross-linguistic variation, I survey non-verbatim elements attested in otherwise canonical direct speech, based on data from a multilingual corpus specifically annotated for reported discourse.

The attested non-verbatim elements turn out to fall into a small number of predictable categories that are roughly in line with the notion of direct speech as faithful representation of an original utterance at the lexical level.

I propose a tentative typology of such elements and discuss some of the issues it raises for the analysis of direct quotation in European languages, problematizing in particular the notion of European direct speech as a canonical type.

On Tatiana Nikitina