Descriptive and diachronic aspects of the Old Irish quotative marker ol

Abstract

The most frequent strategy of direct reported speech in Old Irish (OIr) is characterized by the use of a constituent which is known in this paper as Reported Speaker, which consists of the element ol introducing the noun or the tonic pronoun referring to the person whose words are quoted. This paper offers a formal and pragmatic description of the Old Irish Reported Speaker, paying special attention to its basically nominal character and to its frequent coreferential association with first-person referents in the quote. The OIr quotative marker ol is diachronically explained as a further use of the OIr multifunctional element ol , which is essentially a preposition (‘beyond’) secondarily used as the marker of the NP standard of comparison and as a clausal connective.