This study turns to the pathway of change whereby an originally intransitive manner-of-speaking predicate (e.g. babble, whisper, shout) comes to function in parenthetical clauses as a direct speech reporting predicate. On the descriptive plane, the paper presents a detailed analysis of the recent developments affecting shriek in Early and Late Modern English. The case presented here does not involve the standardly assumed ‘reduction’ of a main clause to an adverbial subject-verb phrase that seems to lack a clausal argument, but rather the augmentation of an intransitive predicate. It does not involve semantic bleaching to a core grammatical meaning such as epistemic hedges or mirative markers or a discursive meaning such as attention-getters, but instead maintains a lexically specific component of manner of speaking. The relevance of the case study is highlighted against the backdrop of broader trends related to transitivization processes with non-prototypical object patterns. The relatively abrupt development is in line with synchronic theories of event lexicalization, which predict that manner roots readily allow for certain argument augmentation patterns that derive a complex event structure. It can be explained on the basis of analogically facilitated co-optation, via a range of semantic and grammatical similarities to other predicates of manner-of-speaking. The study hopes to inspire studies comparing the pathways attested for different semantic subtypes of parentheticals, as well as their interaction, in the near future.

This study offers a reconceptualization of the factive presupposition. It presents a cognitive-functional account based on three central features: the event structure of semantic classes of matrix predicates, the sources of modal stances in the complement clause, and the coercive potential of predicate-complement combinations. In this way the study complements the dominant formal pragmatic and formal syntactic theories on factivity.

In this introduction, we set out the central themes of the special issue. It concentrates on imperfect function-form mappings, and discusses several cases in which specific perspectival meanings are not fully predictable on the basis of a perspectivizing grammatical construction alone. We distinguish two kinds of form-function mismatches: (1) perspective-persistent phenomena, i.e. grammatically signaled deictic and/or cognitive perspective shifts which are not realized in interpretation, and (2) irregular perspective shifts, which involve either grammatically un(der)specified shifts or grammatically signaled shifts that are interpreted as mixing multiple sources of deictic and/or cognitive perspective (‘multiple-perspective constructions’). We briefly discuss and contextualize each of the contributions, and highlight their central findings.

This study examines the diachronic increase in manner-of-speaking verbs taking direct speech complements (e.g. babble, whisper, shout) over the course of the Late Modern English period (cf. Fanego 2012). Drawing on the list of manner-of-speaking predicates provided by Levin (1993: 204-206), it focuses on tracking the pathway of change in the Corpus of Late Modern English texts, version 3.0 (Diller et al. 2011) from mainly intransitive predicates to direct, often referred to as ‘parenthetical’, reporting predicates.

The analysis will focus on two main questions. Firstly, it sets out to examine the degree to which the acquisition of a parenthetical direct reporting use involves the prior acquisition of other reporting patterns (e.g. cognate objects, reaction objects, indirectly reported clauses). This is important to establish the degree to which the attraction to the broader paradigm of reporting constructions (cf. Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970; Halliday & Hasan 1976: 132) facilitates the acquisition of the direct reporting pattern. Secondly, the study analyzes how the notion of ‘discursive secondariness’ (Boye & Harder 2012) is represented in the ‘focus/modifier’ distinction of models of event lexicalization (Erteshik-Shir 2007; Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1998), and how this for the group of manner-of-speaking predicates relates to the notion of ‘manner/result complementarity’, i.e. the idea that a verb root cannot lexicalize ‘manner’ and ‘result state’ simultaneously, with a concomitant difference in argument realization.

Based on original fieldwork data, we discuss the array of uses of yimarne ‘like’ in Kunbarlang (Gunwinyguan, non-Pama-Nyungan; northern Australia), focusing on its reported discourse (RD) functions. First, we describe the range of functions that attest to yimarne’s grammaticalization, and propose a mechanism of domain extension that may underlie the development of the different uses. Then we present an analysis of the distribution and syntax underlying the quotative use of yimarne to contribute to the existing literature on the syntactic typology of quotative indices (QIs), as well as to the description of grammaticalization pathways for similative markers.