Historical change in reported speech constructions in the Chapacuran family

Abstract

The reported speech construction found in the Chapacuran language family of South America has undergone a number of changes in the individual languages, such that its uses extend beyond that of merely reporting speech. In many languages, it is used to express the inner states of the reported speaker, and in some cases it is used to express imperfectivity and causation. This paper argues that the future construction in Moré is a further development of the reported speech construction, one that has been reanalyzed as a basic main clause type. The morphosyntactic properties of the source construction explains the divergent inflectional forms, the loss of object indexation, and the innovation of an object case marker in the future construction. This paper provides new insights into the diachronic pathways that can lead to innovative future constructions as well as the origins of a tense-based split in case marking in Moré.