Abstract
This article investigates ways in which direct reported speech is set apart from the current speaker’s own talk. Drawing on a corpus of conversational Russian materials, the article examines ways in which the onset and the offset of reported speech are marked in ordinary talk. The analysis shows that in most cases quotations are separated from other talk at their beginnings and ends through a variety of devices including grammatical framing, re-anchoring devices, and prosodic shifts for their onset and several repositioning devices and sequence organization practices for their offset. There are, however, ambiguous cases when a particular stretch of talk occurring after a quote is neither clearly separated from the quote nor clearly marked as being part of it. Such cases, referred to in this study as ‘fading out,’ appear to have specific interactional functions allowing the speaker to deal with several potential problems. The findings of this study demonstrate the importance of studying linguistic phenomena on the basis of real conversational data and suggest that the different ways in which reported speech boundaries are demarcated (or not) provide participants with a set of tools they can employ for a variety of interactional purposes.