REPORTED SPEECH / INDIRECT SPEECH : PART I

REPORTED SPEECH / INDIRECT SPEECH

PART I

DIRECT SPEECH

Direct speech is what people actually say in real life situations. Direct speech is referred to as quoted speech and involves repeating the exact words of what someone has said without removing the (“….”) the quotation marks.
For instance, when someone says: “I love my children.” can be quoted as follows:
He / she said, “I love my children.”

REPORTED SPEECH

Reported speech or indirect speech, as it is referred to sometimes, is repeating what someone said but sometime later and this of course involves some changes in the structure of the sentence or the quote in question.
For example, the previously mentioned quote “I love my children.” would be reported in the following ways:

1. He / she says (that) he / she loves his / her children.

2. He / she has said (that) he / she loves his / her children.

3. He / she said (that) he / she loved his / her children.

If you look at the three sentences, you will certainly notice the changes which the original quote underwent.

a. The quotation marks (“….”) were omitted,

b. The subject “I” changed into “he / she” because the speaker can be a man or a woman,

c. The verb “love” became in instances 1 and 2 “loves” because there must be a subject verb agreement,

d. The possessive adjective “my” changed to “his / her”. There must an agreement between the subject and the possessive,

e. In example 3, the verb “love” became “loved”. From a look at the reporting verb or the introductory verb “say” in the three examples, we can notice that in 1 it is in the present “says” , and in 2 it is in the present perfect “has said”.
This simply means that when the reporting verb is in the present or in the present perfect , the verb in the quote does not undergo any tense shift; it remains in its original tense form.

But when the reporting verb is in the past “said”, “told”, “asked”, “wanted to know” and so on, the tense shifts then must be applied to the letter except when the sentence in question expresses certain notions such as request, command, advice, promise and so forth.

To conclude, reported speech or indirect speech simply means applying the necessary tense shifts when the reporting verb is in the simple past as in example 3.