摘要：My interest in the language of dialogue in fiction was first aroused
when I looked into sentence length (de Haan, 1993) and noticed that
the two authors of the crime novels in the Nijmegen corpus were quite
different in their use of what in Quirk et al. (1985) is called ‘reporting
clauses’, and what in the TOSCA analysis system (Oostdijk, 1993) is
referred to as ‘reporting utterances’. One of the two authors, for instance,
far more often made explicit reference to somebody’s speech by means
of reporting clauses than the other. The same author also used far more
different verbs in these reporting utterances than the other. One of the
questions that these observations naturally led to was whether they point
to a different attitude of the author to representing dialogue in fiction
