Quotatives: New Trends and Sociolinguistic Implications

The system of speech and thought reporting of English, as well as a number of related and unrelated languages, has been the site of vast and rapid changes. This book gives an overview of the changes in the area of quotative strategies, with a particular focus on the diffusion of innovative variants and the systemic developments which result from the incursion of newcomer forms.

The volume considers the phenomenon “quotation” from a wealth of perspectives. It consolidates findings from different strands of research, combining formal and functional approaches for the definition of reported discourse and situating the phenomenon in a broader typological and sociolinguistic perspective. While the primary focus of the empirical research is on English, the book also investigates cross-linguistic similarities and differences within this linguistic domain. The volume examines the development of quotation, both from a pan-English perspective as well providing a historical overview over the competition of forms between the 1960s to the 2000s. Corpus-based research on innovative quotative forms is combined with an investigation into the ideologies attached to their users as well as regarding the linguistic acceptability of globalising linguistic forms.