This essay illustrates, by using diachronic corpus evidence, that patterns of reported speech are observable in the earliest written stage of the German language. These can be found not only in the translated texts (such as the Old High German ‚Isidor‘ or ‚Tatian‘) but also in the original German texts (in Otfrid von Weißenburg’s Gospel Book) and they are used differently according to the linguistic and pragmatic requirements of the particular type of discourse.
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