ONE OF THE MANY CHOICES AVAILABLE to speakers of American English as they narrate stories of personal experience is whether or not to include instances of dialogue in the story. Not all speakers do so. However, including instances of verbal interchange is one way speakers can heighten the performance value of their stories, thus making them more vivid. When dialogue is included, speakers have even further choices to make. They can select direct speech or indirect speech (eg, He said," I'm coming" or He said that he was coming). When direct speech is the option, narrators are likewise free to include dialogue without an overt introducer, using a null form or zero introducer (eg, I nudge my husband. 0" Wake up."). Though rare, this interesting choice receives attention from Mathis and Yule (1994). If narrators do choose an overt introducer, an additional discourse resource over which they exercise choice lies in the various tense options available. Among these are the past tense and the historical present, that is, the present tense used to describe past events (as in He says," Don't step on it" used to convey a past event). Tense variation in verbs of saying, its constraints and functions, has been the subject of scholarly interest by Schiffrin (1981), Wolfson (1982), Tannen (1986; 1989), andJohnstone (1987; 1990), among others. But speaker choice does not stop with tense selection. Narrators may optionally select which type of quotative complementizer is to be used as a grammatical indicator that what follows is a representation of the speech or thought of others. They may choose between say, go, or be+ like.'