One of the significant characteristics of language is flexibility. On the one hand, people have various ways to convey certain information to a given addressee. For example, when quoting previous utterances, people can use direct quotations (direct speech) or indirect quotations (indirect speech), depending on which perspective they are taking. On the other hand, people talk about the same things in different ways depending on with whom they are communicating with. For instance, people talk more politely when communicating with individuals who are more powerful compared to individuals who are peers or less powerful. In this dissertation, I focused on factors that contribute to decisions between different ways of communication. To investigate this question, I took the use of direct and indirect speech as a cut-in point. I first examined how linguistic and social factors influenced the use of direct and indirect speech in a narrative task. I further explored the influence of social factors on language production in other contexts (e.g., offline vs. online communication). Taken together, findings from this dissertation suggest that both intrinsic characteristics of the utterance itself and extrinsic characteristics, such as psychological distance between speaker and listener and the listener’s knowledge level, play a role in language production processes
