Evidentials and (relayed) speech acts: hearsay as quotation

Abstract

This paper is devoted to what I will call quotative uses of hearsay evidentials, wherein they report a speech act made by a third party. Occasionally mentioned in the typological literature, quotative uses were first given a formal semantic account by Faller 2002 and have received little attention since. The goal of this paper is to put the spotlight on them. An ongoing debate in the literature is on the semantic status of evidentials and the place of evidentiality among other categories (see Matthewson 2012 and references therein). For  Faller (2002, 2007), quotative uses are among the empirical tests that diagnose illocutionary evidentials, ones that deal with the structure of speech acts. In this paper, I re-implement Faller's original proposal within Krifka's (2014) framework that provides an explicit syntax-pragmatics interface. I then show that quotative readings may be the only argument, out of the currently provided in the literature, in favor of the existence of illocutionary evidentials. However, the status of such readings requires further research. I conclude by discussing quotative uses within a broader context of reported speech strategies.