How report verbs become quote markers and complementisers

In many languages across the world, verbs reporting speech, thoughts and pe rceptions (also referred to as quotative verbs) grammaticalise into quote m arkers and/or complementisers. This paper analyses the change of the items kua and fel? in the Austronesian languages Tukang Besi and Burn, as origina lly full lexical 'report' verbs that became open to reinterpretation as gra mmatical items after having undergone 'semantic bleaching'. It is proposed that the 'semantic bleaching', which crucially involves loss of argument st ructure, is caused by a mismatch between linguistic levels - here between s urface syntax and lexical argument structure. The mismatch involves a viola tion of universal constraints on 'Semantic Transparency' and 'Structural Si mplicity', and results in a reduced lexical representation of the report ve rb as a predicate without arguments. The multifunctional, polysemous charac ter of this 'grammaticalised' item is now a consequence of its interaction with particular surface syntactic constructions. In other words, `V to C' g rammaticalisation is a structurally determined variable interpretation of a lexically impoverished item, and does not involve a change in category (la bels) (contra Harris and Campbell, 1995:63; Heine and Reh, 1984: 37-38; see also Haspelmath, 1998: 327-328). This view of grammaticalised verbs as lex ical forms with reduced argument structure may be extended to other areas o f verb-grammaticalisation. The similar path of grammaticalisation of report verbs across languages is explained by proposing a list of structural char acteristics (of syntax and discourse) that appear to be relevant in allowin g the grammaticalisation to take place. Genetically related languages may d iverge because they differ in one (or more) of those characteristics: the r eport verb in Kambera, a language closely related to Buru and Tukang Besi, did not grammaticalise because of a different surface constituent order. (C ) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reserved.