Abstract The purpose of this study is to re-evaluate the interpretation of a particle that has hitherto been analyzed as a marker either of addressee or the subject of a quoted clause in Ben Tey (Dogon, Mali). As both of these interpretations are typologically rare if not unique, a broader conceptualization for the particle as a quotative topic marker is proposed here. Data are from a newly compiled cross-linguistic annotated corpus of discourse reports within textual contexts. Along with data presentation and analysis, a methodology is illustrated for multilingual comparative corpus construction for the analysis of discourse reporting strategies.