Direct Speech as a Rhetorical Style in Chantyal

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Abstract

In this paper, the author elaborates somewhat on Slobin's notion of 'thinking for speaking' by introducing the construct of 'rhetorical style', by which he means a set of related constructions employed to achieve a particular discourse effect. Just as the presence of a particular grammatical category may impel speakers to organize their thinking to meet the demands of the linguistic encoding of that category on-line, so the use of a given rhetorical style may require similar adjustments in thinking for speaking. The goals of this paper are threefold. First the author presents data, drawn primarily from narrative discourses, on the use of direct quotes in Chantyal, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal. In Chantyal, direct quotes are conveyed by a set of constructions which he refers to collectively as 'quotatives'. Second, he argues that quotatives are used in Chantyal to affect the 'direct speech style', a mode of exploiting quotatives to further narrative goals that in many other languages are achieved by means other than quotatives. And third, he discusses the direct speech style as a 'rhetorical style', and go on to present an overview of rhetorical styles, their uses, their status as areal features, and their diachronic developments.