Talk:Quotative

My Recent Edit

The article said that the quotative was used for "reported speech" (which is already aliased to indirect speech) but then went on to give examples of "quoted speech" (which is aliased to direct speech), i.e., the exact opposite of indirect speech. The examples listed in English, Japanese and Sinhala also indicated direct speech rather than indirect speech, so I changed the page to say "quoted speech" instead of "reported speech." The articles on direct and indirect speech are already cited. I wanted to cite the use of the quotative for direct (rather than indirect) speech specifically, but all my references are language-specific (e.g., A Dictionary of Japanese Particles p. 206 for Japanese, Smyth's Grammar §2590a for Greek). In the Japanese section I also deleted "(colloquially って [tte])" since Japanese "って" is a contraction of "といって" rather than "と" by itself, and furthermore I suggest we remove the first example in the Japanese section since it doesn't have an overt grammatical person in the quoted utterance (since Japanese is pro-drop), and the example that I added does. The preservation of grammatical person and tense is a characteristic of direct speech, so showing this function of the quotative is important. The English example at the top should probably also quote something more interesting than "Wow" to show that the quotative preserves the tense and person of the original utterance rather than adjusting it to the tense and person of the parent clause. Friendly Cave (talk) 19:56, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

"That" as quotative

Hi. A non-English native speaker here. Is the word "that" a type of quotative word, isn't that?

E.g.: "I know THAT you love me'

Doesn't the word THAT function as a quotative word in it? 2804:14D:7682:6489:852B:8C1:5997:9CB5 (talk) 14:38, 24 June 2025 (UTC)