page_title: Logophoricity
section_title: Ewe
hierarchical_section_title: Logophoricity / Logophoric representation in languages / Logophoric languages / Logophoric pronouns / Ewe
caption_attribution_description: English: Tree diagram for the Ewe sentence, 'Kofi said s/he left.'
context_page_description: Logophoricity is a phenomenon of binding relation that may employ a morphologically different set of anaphoric forms, in the context where the referent is an entity whose speech, thoughts, or feelings are being reported. This entity may or may not be distant from the discourse, but the referent must reside in a clause external to the one in which the logophor resides. The specially-formed anaphors that are morphologically distinct from the typical pronouns of a language are known as logophoric pronouns, originally coined by the linguist Claude Hagège. The linguistic importance of logophoricity is its capability to do away with ambiguity as to who is being referred to. A crucial element of logophoricity is the logophoric context, defined as the environment where use of logophoric pronouns is possible. Several syntactic and semantic accounts have been suggested. While some languages may not be purely logophoric, logophoric context may still be found in those languages; in those cases, it is common to find that in the place where logophoric pronouns would typically occur, non-clause-bounded reflexive pronouns appear instead.
context_section_description: Ewe is a language of the Niger-Congo family that exhibits formally distinct logophoric pronouns. The third-person singular pronoun yè is used only in the context of indirect discourse, e.g. when reporting speech and not quoting it. These special forms are a means of unambiguously identifying the nominal co-referent in a given sentence. In the following examples, (a) contains the logophoric pronoun yè, while (b) contains the normal third-person pronoun e. Which pronoun is used determines whether the pronoun refers to the speaker of the proposition (Kofi) or a different individual. 
  The syntax tree shows that the antecedent and logophoric pronoun in (a) are co-referential across a clausal boundary. Notably, logophoric pronouns such as yè may occur at any level of embedding within the same sentence. Additionally, if the antecdent is already established previously within the disourse, the antecedent with which the logophoric pronoun has a coreference relation need not be in the same sentence.
  The semantic condition imposed on the use of these logophors is that the context in which they appear must be reflective of another individual's perception, and not the speaker's subjective account of the linguistic content being transmitted; however, a purely semantic account is insufficient in determining where logophoric pronouns may appear. More specifically, even when the semantic conditions which license the use of logophors are satisfied, there may be additional syntactic conditions which determine whether or not logophoric pronouns actually occur in a sentence. Clements demonstrates that Ewe logophoric pronouns may only be introduced by clauses headed by the complementizer be. In Ewe, be is a clause-typing element that introduces clauses in which the feelings, thoughts, and perspective of an individual other than the speaker are communicated. Thus, although it is primarily the discursive context which licenses the use of logophoric pronouns in Ewe, syntactic restrictions are also important in determining the distribution of pronouns in direct and indirect discourse.
caption: Adapted from Clements (1972), this tree diagram for example (1) illustrates the different co-reference possibilities for a logophoric pronoun versus a normal pronoun.
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