Personal deixis and reported discourse: Towards a typology of person alignment
Résumé
This article explores crosslinguistic variation in the way speech-event participants are mapped to person values, focusing on the encoding of person in reported discourse. It surveys several types of person alignment, or language-specific correspondences between participant discourse roles and person values, and shows that some of the types result in the deictic organization of reported discourse that seems inconsistent from the Eurocentric perspective: only selected person values are “shifted” in reported discourse. Such “inconsistent” patterns are argued to differ in important ways from partial deictic shifts attested in free indirect discourse and other types of optional “semi-direct” discourse.