English direct discourse is easily recognized by e.g. the lack of a complementizer, the quotation marks (or the intonational contour they induce), and verbatim ('shifted') pronouns. Japanese employs the same complementizer for all reports, does not have a consistent intonational quotation marking, and tends to drop pronouns where possible. Some have argued that this just shows many Japanese reports are ambiguous: despite the lack of explicit marking, the underlying distinction is just as hard. On the basis of a number of 'mixed' examples, I claim that the line between direct and indirect is blurred and I propose a unified analysis of speech reporting in which a general mechanism of mixed quotation replaces the classical two-fold distinction.

@INPROCEEDINGS{maier08lenls,
  author = {Emar Maier},
  title = {Japanese reported speech: against a direct--indirect distinction},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of LENLS 2008},
  year = 2008,
  editor = {Norihiro Ogata},
  address = {Asahikawa, Japan},
  month = {June},
  url = {http://ncs.ruhosting.nl/emar/emar_maier_indirectdiscourse_proc.pdf}
}