The Tamil Auxiliary Verb System by Sanford B. Steever

Author:Sanford B. Steever [Steever, Sanford B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415346726
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2005-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

DIRECT AND INDIRECT DISCOURSE

Pragmatic factors may also apply more finely within the set of indicative auxiliaries, partitioning them into two distinct subsets. Causation in Chapter 4 has already established that there are two subsets of indicative auxiliary verbs: attitudinal and nonattitudinal. In general, nonattitudinal auxiliaries can appear in causative constructions while attitudinals cannot. While this distinction is reflected in the syntax, it is also motivated in other contexts by pragmatics. Other grammatical frames are also sensitive to this distinction, most notably reported speech. There are two basic varieties of reported speech in Tamil, direct and indirect discourse (see Steever 2002b). Study of the examples below demonstrates that while both attitudinal and nonattitudinal auxiliaries freely occur in direct discourse, only nonattitudinals appear in indirect discourse.

Jakobson (1971: 130) characterizes reported speech as “a speech within speech, a message within a message…” Reported speech may therefore be thought of as a speech event whose narrated event is itself another speech event, one that has been displaced from its original context. Reported speech is commonly divided into direct and indirect discourse. Jespersen (1965: 292) adroitly characterizes indirect discourse by a shifting of person, tense and mood away from the forms it would have had in direct discourse. In this shifting, the deictic center of the reporting speech captures and assimilates the deictic center of the original, reported speech event. For example, an NP in indirect discourse is assigned first person if it refers to the speaker of the reporting speech event, second person if it refers to the addressee and third person in other cases. Any grammatical form that makes reference to the speech events or its participants, such as person Ps/Pn, tense Es/En, attitude Ps/En, is affected by the deictic shift from direct to indirect discourse. Such a shift is illustrated in the English example of indirect discourse he said that he would come home: on the interpretation where the subject of the main clause is coreferential with the subject of the subordinate clause, the pronoun in the original speech would have been I and the verb phrase would have been will come home, as are preserved in the direct discourse counterpart he said, ‘I will come home.”

Such changes do not occur in direct discourse. The original speech in (176a) is reported in (176b, c and d).

(176) a

S1[nī vā!]

  you-NOM come-IMP

‘You come!’

    b

S0[S1[nī vā] eṉṟu coṉṉāṉ].

  you-NOM come-IMP saying-CF say-PST-3SM

‘He said, “You come!”’

    c

S0[eṉṉai vara.c coṉṉāṉ].

I-ACC come-INF say-PST-3SM

‘He told me/said to me to come.’

    d

[eṉṉai varum paṭi coṉṉāṉ].

I-ACC come-FUT-ADN manner say-PST-3SM

‘He told me to come’

Example (176b) illustrates direct discourse in which the original speech is embedded by the so-called complementizer eṉṟu ‘that’: it is actually the conjunctive eṉa ‘say’, which does not alter the morphological features of the forms it embeds (see Steever 1988). The verb in the subordinate clause continues to bear the inflections of the imperative singular and the subject appears in the nominative case, the forms they would respectively have had in the original speech now being reported.

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