Abstract
The article explores reported speech/thought in spoken Czech, especially reproductions introduced with various forms of říct/říkat (to say), with data provided by the Czech National Corpus. Most reproductions were introduced by the imperfective verb říkat (past and present tenses, first and third persons).
By contrast, reproductions of thought were much less numerous and almost invariably involved the first person. We found twice as many examples of direct speech than indirect speech, and interesting transitional forms, some of which can be described as free indirect speech.
Pauses separating introductory constructions from reproductions appear to be more typical of direct than indirect speech, but are generally infrequent, suggesting a lower degree of segmentation of spoken language. Sometimes, reproductions of the speech of others were signalled with reduced introductory constructions, with verba dicendi substituted by signals other than verbs, whereas reproductions of one's own speech were normally introduced with a verbum dicendi.