The article explores reported speech/thought in spoken Czech, especially reproductions introduced with various forms of říct/říkat (to say), with data provided by the Czech National Corpus. Most reproductions were introduced by the imperfective verb říkat (past and present tenses, first and third persons). By contrast, reproductions of thought were much less numerous and almost invariably involved the first person. We found twice as many examples of direct speech than indirect speech, and interesting transitional forms, some of which can be described as free indirect speech. Pauses separating introductory constructions from reproductions appear to be more typical of direct than indirect speech, but are generally infrequent, suggesting a lower degree of segmentation of spoken language. Sometimes, reproductions of the speech of others were signalled with reduced introductory constructions, with verba dicendi substituted by signals other than verbs, whereas reproductions of one’s own speech were normally introduced with a verbum dicendi.
In the stylization of spontaneous, non-prepared spoken expression in contemporary literary texts (including prose, drama, and even comics), one of the most striking syntactic elements to emerge is the one-syllable word (se, si, sem, sme, ste, mě, mi, tě, ti, bych, by…) at the beginning of an utterance or turn. Sgall and Hronek (1992) call these words enclitics or proclitics, though according to J. Toman (2002) or A. Svoboda (2002) they are not clitics. However, all of these authors consider them to be the result of word-order inversion (Se mu to nepovedlo = ''Nepovedlo se mu to'') or of processes of ellipsis (Bych si taky myslel = ''To bych si taky myslel''). Yet there are likely also other motivations, e.g. phonetic ones related to the specific techniques of spoken expression. This type is common in our research, for example, in the communication of young people engaging in internet chat, i.e. in written texts strongly influenced by spoken expression. With the help of corpora of spoken Czech and literary texts from the Czech National Corpus (SYN2000, SYN2005, SYN2010), the authors found that these one-syllable beginnings of utterances or turns are a striking and non-detachable sign of contemporary colloquial Czech, of authentic Czech dialogues - and thus not merely a myth heavily sustained by Czech authors of literary texts, who make efforts to stylize casual expression.