Chapter 105Quotation, Logophoric Speech, and Indirect Reports
Quoted person reference, the syntactic reassessment of logophoric speech, indirect content, ordering flexibility, and regional predicate selection.
105.1 Quoted speech and person reference
Sekor marks quoted material in many southern Hokkaido examples. The quotation can contain ordinary first-person forms or forms from the fourth-person series referring to the quoted speaker. This latter use is called logophoric: it identifies the person whose words or perspective are represented Nikitina & Bugaeva (2021: 613, §2).
‘They said, ‘I will go.’’
Nikitina & Bugaeva 2021: 613; Saru, Example 1b, quoting Tamura 2000:74
English ‘they’ leaves the speaker's gender unspecified. Asinuma and =an refer to that quoted speaker. The source's LOG labels are normalized to the fourth-person form series used here.
The form =an remains fourth-person morphology even when its referent is a third person from the current reporter's viewpoint. Identifying a referent and identifying a morphological form are separate tasks. Ordinary third-person marking on hawean introduces the quoted person's speech.
105.2 Direct, logophoric, and indirect analyses
Bugaeva's earlier account organizes reported discourse into direct, semi-direct, and indirect types, taking the orientation of person reference as a central criterion. Her semi-direct category combines the quoted speaker's and reporter's perspectives Bugaeva (2008: 31).
Nikitina and Bugaeva later compare syntactic properties. They find that Ainu logophoric speech patterns with direct speech in its flexible relation to reporting material, while indirect speech behaves more like a selected object complement Nikitina & Bugaeva (2021: §§3.1–3.2). A change in person reference therefore does not by itself diagnose an indirect complement.
‘‘I told it because I was old,’ said an esteemed elder.’
Nikitina & Bugaeva 2021: 619; Saru, Example 11a, citing Nakagawa et al., K7908051UP.377
The quoted speaker is expressed with fourth-person forms. Sino nispa stands between sekor and the reporting verb; the construction does not require adjacency between those two words.
The study also documents quotations placed within reporting material and cases without an overt speech verb Nikitina & Bugaeva (2021: §§3.1–3.2). The usual sequence of quotation followed by sekor is compatible with this broader syntactic flexibility.
105.3 Indirect content and the reporting viewpoint
Nakagawa describes indirect speech with markers such as kuni, kunak, yak, and kusu, followed by transitive predicates including ye ‘say’ and ramu ‘think’. The forms have different distributions; they do not constitute a freely interchangeable set Nakagawa (2024: 475–479).
‘My wicked father said that he would kill you, and…’
Nakagawa 2024: 475; Saru, Example 1106
A young man reports his absent father's threat to his wife. ‘You’ identifies the wife from the young man's reporting viewpoint; the father is the zero-marked third-person actor of rayke.
This example has no mechanical conversion of every embedded first person to fourth person. Reference is assigned from the reporting viewpoint. Nakagawa also distinguishes the embedded verb phrase from a full quotation: his indirect construction excludes the final particle na retained in the corresponding quoted utterance Nakagawa (2024: 476, example 1107). Chapter 107 (Kuni, Indirect Complements, and Purpose Clauses) discusses the individual complement frames.
105.4 Dialect and predicate selection
Refsing's Shizunai description uses ari with speech predicates and with yaynu ‘think, reflect’, while ramu selects kuni in her account Refsing (1986: 265–267). Her comparison with frequent Saru sekor is explicitly based on Hattori's dialect dictionary. These descriptions cannot be combined into one unrestricted alternation of ari and sekor.
Narrative quotation can also mix person series. Nakagawa documents Horobetsu dialogue with both first-person plural and fourth-person forms referring to the speaker, and notes uncertainty in translating particular occurrences as ‘I’ or ‘we’ Nakagawa (2024: 475, example 1105). The original performance and its discourse context remain essential to interpreting a quoted participant.
References cited in this chapter
Bugaeva (2008) ·Nakagawa (2024) ·Nikitina & Bugaeva (2021) ·Refsing (1986)