Il discorso riportato nel linguaggio giornalistico tedesco. Considerazioni testuali in ottica Deutsch als Fremdsprache

This paper examines the various forms of reported speech in German from a textual perspective, extending the analysis beyond the sentence level. Drawing on a corpus of online press texts, sequences of reported speech are investigated with regard to the difficulties encountered by learners of German as a foreign language in decoding processes. On the one hand, a sequence of reported speech may not be readily recognizable as such due to the low cognitive salience of one or more of its constituent elements − namely, the speaker, the reporting act, and the reported utterance. On the other hand, the internal structure of a sequence may be difficult to process because of fuzzy boundaries, forms of lexical and grammatical variation, and a potentially misleading textual layout.