Reported speech can be defined as the rendering by writing of spoken utterances. From the beginning of French, sequences or episodes of reported speech are inserted into texts. Sometimes monologic, sometimes dialogic, these episodes are explicitly distinguished from the rest of texts thanks to a system of linguistic marks or tags. In this article, we are interested in the marks that provide the outer boundary of those episodes (the borders with the narrative) and that contribute to their internal structuring into smaller units (turns for each change in speaker). The middle (dit-il, fait-il) and beginning (li rois li dist) reporting clauses are part of those marks. Their formal and functional characteristics are studied in a balanced diachronic corpus, the BFM medieval French corpus (9th-16th, 4.7 million words) using the systematic and exhaustive analysis tools provided by the TXM software. The study reveals two parallel changes. From a formal point of view, the middle and the beginning reporting clauses differentiate between the ninth and the end of the thirteenth century: the verbs which are used (faire and dire), the expression of the subject (mandatory or not, in a pronominal or nominal form), the order of constituents (SV or VS) are progressively no longer the same. From a functional point of view, the middle and the beginning reporting clauses specialize themselves more slowly and belatedly, the first in the markup of the alternation of speech turns, the second in the tagging of the entry in the episode of reported speech. Data interpretation allows us to propose a model of evolution of the middle and beginning reporting clauses in three phases (ninth - mid-twelfth century / mid twelfth - 1300 / 1300 - 1500). This model provides information on the evolution of two specific linguistic markers of reported speech and shows how the vernacular language develops its own “mark-up” system before the advent of print and modern typographic signs (quotation marks, dashes).