This paper shows that embedded clauses in sentences with verbs of speech like objasnit' 'explain' in Russian receive two distinct interpretations: they can describe what fact or claim undergoes the eventuality described by the verb (e.g., what is being explained), and they can describe what was uttered (e.g., what the explanation was). The author shows that the two interpretations correlate with a number of syntactic and semantic properties of these sentences, and argues that the meanings of embedded clauses and of verbal roots are uniform across the two readings, but the syntactic structures corresponding to the two readings are different. The paper proposes an analysis according to which embedded clauses are always modifiers of entities with propositional content (Kratzer 2006; 2016, Moulton 2009; 2015, Bogal-Allbritten 2017, Elliott 2017), but they can modify two kinds of such entitites: internal arguments of verbs and the event argument. With verbs like objasnit' 'explain', these two options arise in sentences with different argument and event structures: when a CP describes the internal argument of the verb, this internal argument is a holder of the result state in a bi-eventive causative construction, but when the CP describes the event argument, it is a modifier of an achievement predicate that denotes a saying event with an intention specified by the verbal root.