Reported speech in Russian and Italian: verbs of speech and particles

Abstract

The present paper describes a well-known phenomenon: Languages without a special grammatical category to transmit reported speech often do so by lexical means. The analysis focuses on the Russian particles `mol’ and `deskat'’ – formed from the Old Russian verbs of speech – and their Italian correspondences. Using the semantico-contextual approach, the description offered here helps to formulate the semantics of the two particles and to find their contextual correspondences in Italian.