This paper presents some work on direct and indirect speech in Portuguese using corpus-based methods: we report on a study whose aim was to identify (i) Portuguese verbs used to introduce reported speech and (ii) syntactic patterns used to convey reported speech, in order to enhance the performance of a quotation extraction system, dubbed QUEMDISSE?. In addition, (iii) we present a Portuguese corpus annotated with reported speech, using the lexicon and rules provided by (i) and (ii), and discuss the process of their annotation and what was learned.