Using prosody to express evidentiality : The case of the quotative

The goal of this study was to investigate if pure prosodic marking of evidentiality, more specifically quotation, does exist and, secondly, if the particular prosodic traits involved in such prosodic marking are arbitrary or somewhat motivated. Data containing a set of identical sentence pairs in Spanish (the only difference being the presence or absence of quotation in them) was collected by means of a Discourse Completion Task and analyzed in order to find prosodic patterns. The results suggested that an affirmative answer must be given to the first question, as the quoted fragments were consistently marked in the four languages with a break before the quoted fragment (and often after it) and a change in voice quality, more specifically by raising the pitch of the snippet. An extension of the study was carried out in three different languages from three different language families (Swedish, Polish and Hungarian) to check if the traits observed were an idiosyncratic feature of Spanish or a more widespread phenomenon. The same conclusive results were observed in all three languages. Regarding the question of the arbitrariness or motivation of the prosodic markers, the results suggest that both of the prosodic traits found are indeed motivated. Speakers use metonymically traits that are the most salient when in an everyday conversation a new speaker takes the floor (a gap and a change of voice quality) to convey that the enunciator has changed and the fragment at glance is to be attributed to an individual other than the speaker. The consistent choice of pitch raising to mark the change of enunciator (as opposed to pitch lowering, for example) is argued to be related to issues of language embodiment