Direct and free direct forms of representation in the discourse of newspaper reports: less frequent phenomena

This paper comments on selected aspects of free direct and direct forms of representation occurring in a corpus of British newspaper reports and describes them from a number of perspectives. A few comments are made on the corpus studied, speech, writing and thought distinction and the frequency of occurrence of the individual forms on each scale. Since the use of reported language in newspaper reports has been studied thoroughly from a number of angles, the present paper turns attention to phenomena that occur less frequently but nevertheless are worth examining. The aspects focused on are embedded direct and free direct reports, direct thought reports and hypothetical (free) direct reports. These phenomena are interpreted in terms of the overall function of reported language in newspaper reports and the connection between them is discussed.