What does manner of speech mean

Technical English. Objective Effective verbal communication relies on a shared understanding of a common language, and also a shared understanding of a common Vocabulary, or Glossary. All courses are available in Hong Kong. Check the schedule above for details. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Essential Meaning of speech. She thanked us in her acceptance speech. She has a mild speech impediment.

Many words are more common in speech than in writing. Full Definition of speech. Synonyms for speech Synonyms address , declamation , harangue , oration , peroration , talk Visit the Thesaurus for More.

Examples of speech in a Sentence She has to make a speech at the convention. The critics say that his sublimity of diction is sometimes carried to an extreme, so that his language becomes inflated. Tragedy is a drama in which the diction is dignified, the movement impressive, and the ending unhappy. He loved a correct and classic diction , and never underrated style, so long as style was not an excuse for poverty of thought. The choice of words. Diction is effective when words are appropriate to an audience.

New Word List Word List. Save This Word! For the study of perspective this has the implication that in extended reported speech we see non-perspective expressions emerge, both semantically Gentens et al.

Reported speech typically signals that the content of the Report is grounded in a perspective other than that of the current speaker at the speech moment.

For most examples of extended reported speech the perspective associated with the Matrix and the Report is the same for both unit, however, that is, that of the current speaker.

The loss of perspective meaning may also be iconically signalled in the linguistic structure through the various marking variations found in extended reported speech The examples illustrated in this study appear to suggest that extended reported speech often also operates in the categorial twilight area between direct speech and non-direct speech.

Even though most authors in our survey in Section 2 consider reported speech expressions other than direct speech marked or even exceptional in the respective language, very few of the examples of extended reported speech cited are common direct speech structures. After having noted that extended reported speech constitutes a wide range of subtypes, that are nevertheless quite regular and can be related to a common semantic origin and more impressionistically share certain structural features, we would like to return to the research programme that we started out with at the beginning of this paper: the study of fictive interaction.

This allows us to propose a fundamental hypothesis about how these grammatical meanings may ultimately have arisen in the evolution of language. Pascual convincingly demonstrates that metaphors of conversation are a frequent strategy for speakers to explain complex concepts and may affect language at any grammatical level. Furthermore, our ability to reason, according to Mercier and Sperber , arose out of a discursive need to evaluate the effectiveness of our arguments in conversation.

Like most evolved capacities, this is not a uniquely human trait de Waal, , but it is a necessary step for the use of symbolic communication Dor, Built on these cognitive foundations, the assumption that language started out as situation-specific calls, developing into non-situation specific symbolic conventions for communication of ever increasing complexity cf. Dor, , ch. The type of linguistic structures specifically dedicated to this task are reported speech. If linguistic reflexivity, that is, thinking and talking about language, is at the heart of the complexification of grammar, reported speech is at the heart of language evolution, which would at once explain its universality in the languages of the world and its relation to grammatical categories, as indicated by the range of functions summarised in Section 2.

We do not wish to suggest that any of the languages cited in this paper represent an evolutionary early stage of grammatical development. Given the importance of metaphors of conversation in language Pascual, , grammaticalisation and semantic extension of reported speech structures may be cyclical or run parallel to other diachronic developments. We also do not suggest that in deep history all markers of, e.

Rather, we would propose that the semantic components of reported speech provide a model for the lexical and grammatical meanings listed in Once the communicative utility of this meaning is adopted by the speech community, it may have been marked through a special form of a reported speech construction, or a newly emerged form dedicated to this specific meaning. In this scenario, reported speech constructions may either have acted as a formal source for grammatical categories associated with the functions in 19 or a semantic model.

In order to test this hypothesis we need to further examine the semantic commonalities between reported speech and the respective grammatical categories involved in the extensions, as well as the semantic oppositions that exist between extended reported speech and morphological categories in the languages that both have, e. Nonetheless, the regularity of the large range of semantic extensions of reported speech, as well as their apparent similarity to the meanings of some of the most basic grammatical categories in the languages of the world, is unlikely to be coincidental.

Although the evolutionary story sketched here is inevitably speculative, we believe that it is also a plausible story about the development of grammatical complexity and constitution of grammatical categories.

Above all, it motivates the importance of gaining a deeper understanding of the diversity of structures and meanings associated with extended reported speech and their relation to perspective expressions and grammar more generally.

In this article we have aimed to develop a typological approach to extended reported speech, highlighting both the wide-ranging forms and functions of the phenomenon and its apparent regularity. Much work remains to be done in order to gain a fuller picture of both the semantic patterns found in extended reported speech around the world, and of the structural patterns employed to express these meanings.

These typological questions should be answered in dialogue with theoretical discussions about how quotation shifts perspective and what the semantic status is of the content of a Report; as well as what aspects of reported speech are conventional and which are pragmatic. The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation. Both authors discussed the content and structure of the article.

DC constructed the typological sample, produced the map and collected the examples cited in Section 4. SS designed the study and wrote the article.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers.

Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher. Where these include abbreviations that do not follow the standard of the Leipzig Glossing Rules Bickel et al. We will explore potential connections between morphosyntactic structure and interpretation in Section 4. Ershova, , 78 , so it does not seem a necessary interpretation for this example.

Unfortunately, our sample only includes oral languages but the increasing availability of descriptive grammars will hopefully allow us to discuss examples from sign languages in future work. Zemp, We thank a reviewer for pointing out this connection. A particularly prominent example of such a development is formed by pronouns, which may develop evidential meanings cf.

Zemp, or take on referential meanings specific to the reported speech context cf. Nikitina, Aikhenvald, A. Oxford etc: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, M. Austin: University of Texas.

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