Reported speech as enactment

We examine the proposal by Spronck and Nikitina (this issue) that the phenomenon known as ‘reported speech’ constitutes a dedicated syntactic domain. This domain is defined as a “dedicated syntactic relation that differs from other sentential syntactic structures”, containing elements which are “primarily conventionalized and conditioned by grammar in a narrower sense”. Their stated goal is to “identify and classify phenomena occurring in the context of reported speech, and to propose benchmarks for establishing reported speech as a cross-linguistic category”.