A quotative's grammatical device to mark reported speech in some languages. It can be equated with "spoken quotation marks". In the English sentence (1) John said "Wow", there's no word indicating that we're dealing with reported speech. This's only indicated typographically. In Sinhala on the other hand, the equivalent sentence (2) John Wow kiyalaa kivvaa has an overt indication of reported speech after the reported string Wow, the quotative kiyalaa.… (More on Quotative)