Pragmatic and semantic commitment when using quotative markers, with application to French dire and genre

Utterers make commitments, for example when they produce Direct Discourse reports. Do the words chosen to frame a quotation affect those commitments, as has been argued by several authors (e.g. Romaine and Lange, 1991; Buchstaller, 2014)? In particular, do users of 'old' and 'new' quotatives (e.g. dire and genre) make different commitments vis-a-vis the object of their report, the degree of faithfulness of that report, the depiction of additional nonverbal aspects? Within a framework rooted in Clark and Gerrig's (1990) theory of quotations as demonstrations, and on the basis of diverse data sources, this paper shows that the commitments which are inherent in the act of quotation take precedence over those that result from the choice of a quotative expression. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.