This paper presents a quantitative study of the use of the Konjunktiv and Indikativ moods in German indirect speech. By analyzing a corpus of 400 news articles of online publications, it describes the factors that influence the choice of indirect speech mood. For this purpose, the following hypotheses were considered: the choice of indirect speech mood can be influenced by the type of reporting verb (sagen/to say, erklären/to explain, etc), by its position (before or after the indirect speech), by the tense of the reporting verb, by the type of verb of the indirect speech (regular, irregular, auxiliary), if the subordinate clause is initiated or not by a conjunction, the degree of embeddedness of the subordinate clause and the distance between the reporting verb and the verb of the indirect speech.
German; Indirect Speech; Linguistic Variation; Verbal Mood
