What is "quotative"

n. (context linguistics English) Form of the complementizer related to the verb ''say'', found in many languages of West Africa and South Asia.

A quotative is a grammatical device to mark quoted speech in some languages, and as such it preserves the grammatical person and tense of the original utterance rather than adjusting it as would be the case with reported speech. It can be equated with "spoken quotation marks". In the English sentence

there is no word indicating that we are dealing with quoted speech. This is only indicated typographically. In Sinhala on the other hand, the equivalent sentence

has an overt indication of quoted speech after the quoted string Wow, the quotative kiyalaa.