Zum Quotativ im Cerma (Gur)

This article describes the grammaticalisation path of the quotative in Cerma, a Gur language spoken in the south-west of Burkina Faso. Unlike in neighbouring languages, the quotative is not based on the de-semanticised verb ‘to say’, but on the entire predication reduced to the subject (pronoun). Since all introductions of reported speech in Cerma are formed by narrative constructions and these are characterised by a special form of the subject pronoun, the quotative is easy to identify. Since the language has a strict agreement rule, there is no fixed quotative form. The quotative thus changes according to the nominal class of the head noun or shows the corresponding form of the personal pronouns. However, there are traces of further grammaticalisation in that the class 1 pronoun is increasingly used as complementizer in indirect speech. In addition, there is a marker which may precede the reported speech, and which presumably expresses the epistemic modality. It probably goes back to a similative conjunction.