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In many languages across the world, verbs reporting speech, thoughts and perceptions (also referred to as quotative verbs) grammaticalise into quote markers and/or complementisers. This paper analyses the change of the items kua and fen in the Austronesian languages Tukang Besi and Buru, as originally full lexical ‘report’ verbs that became open to reinterpretation as grammatical items after having undergone ‘semantic bleaching’. It is proposed that the ‘semantic bleaching’, which crucially involves loss of argument structure, is caused by a mismatch between linguistic levels — here between surface syntax and lexical argument structure. The mismatch involves a violation of universal constraints on ‘Semantic Transparency’ and ‘Structural Simplicity’, and results in a reduced lexical representation of the report verb as a predicate without arguments. The multifunctional, polysemous character of this …