Une étude de corpus pour éclairer la question du verbe de l’incise en Français

This paper presents a corpus-based study of the class of French verbs like dire in Jean arrivera demain, dit Max, used to introduce indirect speech. We compare literary and press corpora and show that such 'comment clauses' have a different function in the two types of corpora, characterised by the use of different verbs, tenses, and punctuation marks. Our study shows that the commonly-accepted idea that the primary reporting verb is dire, and the most frequent tense is simple past, is not accurate.