The reported speech revisited: a question of self and expression

A critical review of existing approaches in teaching students and examining them on the intricacies of the Reported Speech has shown a marked lack of systematicity and a number of fallacious assumptions. These approaches are lamentably prescriptive and fail to account for the wealth of data in real usage which apparently flout the prescribed rules.
Looking at evidence from a corpus of real excerpts from three reputable American newspapers (see appendix), the paper seeks to show that patterns which are normally dismissed as non-canonical or mere exceptions are in fact demonstrably more significant than the other patterns and, therefore, cannot be dismissed.
This finding necessitates a revisiting of the grammatical conceptualisation of the Reported Speech and calls for evidence from other disciplines, namely Speech and Thought Presentation in Narratology and the analytic kit of Pragmatics.