Co-constructing and other-extending collaborative reported speech in Italian

Abstract

This study investigates a grammatical and actional type of collaborative turn in Italian: collaborative reported speech (CRS), whereby participants jointly report talk. Drawing on Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis, it analyzes three ways in which CRS is built: 1) A speaker utters a quotative frame, another speaker provides a quote (resulting in co-constructed quotation in line with Lerner’s 1991 notion of compound TCU); 2) A speaker articulates a quotative frame and quote, another speaker extends the potentially complete turn with an additional quote (expanding Lerner’s compound TCU); 3) A speaker articulates a TCU without a quotative frame, another speaker co-constructs with a quote. In all cases, multiclausal constructions emerge to implement direct, indirect, or free reported speech. Participants draw on grammatical projection and latency, and orient to anaphoric and cataphoric morphosyntactic resources in order to ensure the integration of their TCUs and clauses. By doing so, they also ensure that their voice is heard as aligned with the teller’s; they demonstrate their engagement in the same activity, a shared understanding of the teller’s stance, and of a specific event and its ‘tone’; ultimately, they show a choral orientation toward doing being the same voice.