Can you say 'that' again?: the status of direct and indirect speech as grammatical categories

Standard accounts of English reported speech (RS) in terms of a binary typology -direct versus indirect speech - fail when freely produced RS is analysed. Assumptions of binary syntactic encoding (based on clause structure) and binary semantic value (based on lexical identity or nonidentity) are inadequate. This is the first study to compare multiple subjects’ freely produced narrative RS with controlled antecedent utterances. Particular attention is given to elicitation methodology. The study finds that in formulating RS, speakers make choices among verbs, discourse particles, and deictic elements to achieve narrative effect