Elduayen, Luis Gastón (2007). Introduire le discours d’autrui: Actes de parole et verbes “secondaires” dans la presse franco-espagnole [Introducing other people’s discourse: Speech acts and “secondary” verbs in the French-Spanish press]. Revista española de lingüística aplicada, 20, 37-58. PDF (open access)

Is it necessary to recall that it is ultimately through the speech acts generated by verba dicendi that reported speech is introduced, clarified, even explicated, and that readers are placed on the path of good reception? With public life being nothing short of an immense interlocutional labyrinth, the importance of the words spoken and reported by the written press (in this case the French-Spanish written press), on the one hand, and that of the “relating” verbs, on the other, comes into even sharper focus. The object of this analysis, which is fundamentally semantic, will be this class of “secondary” items – secondary by reason of their frequency. It is a class that, at times, may even include collateral items, i.e. items which, precisely because of their function, belong to the said class but whose semantics is often unrelated to it.