Direct speech
Encyclopedia
Direct or quoted speech is a sentence
(or several sentences) that reports speech or thought in its original form, as phrased by the first speaker. It is usually enclosed in quotation mark
s. The cited speaker is either mentioned in the inquit (Latin "he says") or implied.
Sentence (linguistics)
In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
(or several sentences) that reports speech or thought in its original form, as phrased by the first speaker. It is usually enclosed in quotation mark
Quotation mark
Quotation marks or inverted commas are punctuation marks at the beginning and end of a quotation, direct speech, literal title or name. Quotation marks can also be used to indicate a different meaning of a word or phrase than the one typically associated with it and are often used to express irony...
s. The cited speaker is either mentioned in the inquit (Latin "he says") or implied.
Examples
- He said, "It's raining."
- "It's raining," he thought.
- "It's cold outside," he said, "and it's starting to rain."
- "How is the weather?" — "It's cold outside." — "Yes, and it's starting to rain."