Nikitina Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2017

Discourse reporting in African storytelling

The project explores the role of discourse reporting in West African storytelling and the grammatical strategies used by storytellers to achieve their goals. It focuses on three phenomena characteristic of the narrative grammar of a number of West African languages: - logophoricity, or the use of special markers to signal self-reference by characters other than the current narrator, - the use of quotative markers (commonly described as "epistemic validators"), - and the use of foreign language or modified versions of the native language to represent the speech of certain characters. The different phenomena are argued to serve the same purpose: they help speakers manage the distance between…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.