Reportative and quotative marker in Atayal: The problem of source

The quotative index mha in Atayal has been analyzed by L. Huang as a grammaticalized speech verb. The typologically trivial path proposed for this grammaticalization process, however, seems to be inconsistent with Atayal data presented in this paper. There is evidence for mha being a predicate of generalized action and probably never having been a proper speech verb. Predicates of such generalized semantics also tend to evolve into quotative indexes, as can be seen in some African languages.