Quoted speech is often set off by punctuation marks, in particular quotation
marks. Thus, it might seem that the quotation marks would be extremely useful
in identifying these structures in texts. Unfortunately, the situation is not
quite so clear. In this work, I will argue that quotation marks are not
adequate for either identifying or constraining the syntax of quoted speech.
More useful information comes from the presence of a quoting verb, which is
either a verb of saying or a punctual verb, and the presence of other
punctuation marks, usually commas. Using a lexicalized grammar, we can license
most quoting clauses as text adjuncts. A distinction will be made not between
direct and indirect quoted speech, but rather between adjunct and non-adjunct
quoting clauses.Comment: 11 pages, 11 ps figures, Proceedings of SIGPARSE 96 - Punctuation in
Computational Linguistic