VARIATION IN A NARRATIVE CORPUS OF MANO AND KPELLE: CONTACT-INDUCED OR NOT?

International audience This paper explores a corpus of spontaneous narratives and narrative retellings told by children and adults in Mano and Kpelle, two contacting Mande languages. It focuses on quotative constructions as a key point of grammatical dissimilarity between Mano and Kpelle. In the Mano speech of some bilingual children, however, these constructions are found to manifest features bringing them closer to the Kpelle counterparts. We study correlation of different aspects of variation in quota tive constructions across domains (distributional properties and morphosyntax) and compare them against other phenomena, including the use of Conjunctive forms and polypredicative structures. We conclude by observing that none of the variation patterns, including variation in the quotative construction, can be explained solely by cross-linguistic influence. We confirm prior observations that Mano remains conservative despite the pressure of contact with Kpelle.