In many languages, expressions of the type 'x said: "p"', 'x said that p' or 'allegedly, p' share properties with common syntactic types such as constructions with subordination, paratactic constructions, and constructions with sentence level adverbs. On closer examination, however, they often turn out to be atypical members of these syntactic classes. In this paper we argue that a more coherent picture emerges if we analyse these expressions as a dedicated syntactic domain in itself, which we refer to as 'reported speech'. Based on typological observations we argue for the idiosyncrasy of reported speech as a syntactic class. The article concludes with a proposal for a cross-linguistic characterisa-tion that aims at capturing this broadly conceived domain of reported speech with a single semantic definition.