QUOTE - UNQUOTE? : the role of prosody in the contextualization of reported speech sequences

This paper investigates how speakers of English can use theprosodic design of utterances to identify parts of theseutterances as instances of reported speech. We will show thatprosodic changes can function like quotation marks in writtentexts by clearly delimiting left and right hand boundaries of thereported sequence.In the majority of cases, however, prosodic changes do notcoincide with the boundaries of reported speech but occurnearby, functioning like a 'frame' for the interpretation of asequence as reported or even only as a 'flag' attractingattention and inviting the listener to actively (re-)constructthe corresponding boundaries.Our data analysis also provides evidence for the use ofprosodic designs to typify a figure in different roles, which -due to their unique 'prosodic design' - can be presentedwithout any verbalized projection of upcoming reportedspeech, once they have been introduced. This is due to the'referent-tracking' nature of some prosodic designs of reportedutterances