Abstract

Crosslinguistic studies on reported speech show the importance of studying this phenomenon in the languages of West Africa, where, due to the complexity of its narratological techniques, language is valued as the bearer of oral tradition. This article analyzes if these discourse traditions survive in situations of second language acquisition in migratory contexts. In order to do so, the direct speech is analyzed in a corpus of Wolof native L2 learners of Spanish, and a formal and functional description is carried out. The results show two main features. Firstly, direct speech is a very frequent resource in the corpus, since it accounts for 26 % of the total of words, with an eminently narrative function. Secondly, the corpus includes characteristics of direct speech that are beyond the canonical definition, such as the combination of two perspectives. These facts are explained through the transfer of a discourse tradition typical of Senegalese culture, the participatory transposition, which retains its formal and discourse-pragmatic values in Spanish as a second language.