Logophoric pronouns outside speech and attitude reports in Wan

International audience This study aims to illustrate the complex nature of logophoricity by exploring the use of logophoric pronouns outside speech and attitude reports in a corpus of Wan, a Mande language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire. Logophoricity in Wan can be seen as a gradient phenomenon, in two different senses. First, only the singular logophoric pronoun is truly specialized while the plural pronoun retains vestigial uses that are not logophoric; these uses rarely come up in elicitation but are attested in narrative discourse. The non-logophoric uses of the plural pronoun introduce a number asymmetry that seems to be typical of logophoric languages and which I propose to explain in diachronic terms, by the fact that singular and plural pronouns undergo historical change at different rates. Second, logophoric pronouns appear in contexts that do not involve any speech or attitude reporting. In addition to contexts that are often associated with reported speech constructions in other languages (such as expressions of intention or purpose), logophoric pronouns appear in Wan in expressions that have not been previously related to reported speech. Despite the considerable overlap of contexts where logophoric pronouns appear and contexts where verbs of speaking or quotative markers can be used, the two are not identical, and the discrepancies suggest that logophoricity cannot be defined in terms of reported speech but should rather be treated in its own right, as a non-derivable category of pronominal deixis.