Quotatives in Guinean and Liberian Kpelle: A study of parallel Bible corpora and non-biblical texts

In this paper, I explore the use of reported speech constructions in the Bible translations into Guinean and Liberian Kpelle, the two closely related varieties of Kpelle macrolanguage (Mande, West Africa), as well as in a small corpus of non-Biblical texts in these varieties. In both Guinean and Liberian Kpelle, quotative items introducing reported speech are multifunctional morphological amalgams consisting of pronominals fused with the verb kɛ́ ‘say’. Despite the morphological similarity of quotatives in Guinean and Liberian Kpelle, their syntactic behavior is different in the two varieties. First, quotatives have more functions in Guinean Kpelle than in Liberian Kpelle: they can appear as complementizers and markers of volition and purpose in the former variety, but not in the latter one. Second, in Guinean Kpelle, quotatives tend to function as quotative predicators, while in Liberian Kpelle, they usually appear as quotative markers co-occurring with speech verbs. Furthermore, in Guinean Kpelle, the pronominal addressees co-occurring with quotative predicators are often semantically empty. Non-predicative quotatives also co-occur with empty addressees in Guinean Kpelle, presumably inheriting this feature from quotative predicators. Finally, a surprising asymmetry was discovered and proved similar across the two varieties. In both Guinean and Liberian Kpelle, the marking of addressees in the matrix expression is different for the speech verb ɓó ‘say’ and quotative predicators. While quotative predicators are more likely to license pronominal than lexical addressees, the speech verb tends to co-occur with zero or lexical addressees. The tendencies observed in the Bible translations proved to be the same in non-Biblical texts suggesting that the Bible translations adequately represent the syntax of reported speech constructions in Guinean and Liberian Kpelle.