The word itself and the quotation’s position

Al-Aṣwāt — Sound-words, Their Two Uses and Grammatical Analysis

Reported speech has a syntactic position, but that does not give every word inside the quotation an accusative ending.

In «قَالَ الصَّبِيُّ: غاق», we parse قَالَ and الصَّبِيُّ normally while treating the sound as quoted speech.

This distinction matters with indeclinable expressions.