Reported Speech

Миних Мария Александровна

Reported speech has attracted the attention of scholars in several different fields, such as, Linguistics, Poetics, Logic, and the Philosophy of Language.
The phenomenon of the reported speech in English is outstanding because the speaker is free to blend information about an utterance with information about the world not conveyed by that utterance. This is the special type of ambiguity only to be found in indirect speech. To understand this ambiguity, first it is necessary to discuss the fundamental differences between direct and indirect speech with a special emphasis on a kind of sentence meaning. Then, how the function of speech reporting is grammatically coded.

Consider two examples,
one illustrating direct speech, the other indirect speech:

Similarly, both have the same verb, "said" with the same subject, "John". Although the two clauses are different in form, they both convey the same message. The most readily observable differences are syntactic:
first, the pronouns in (1) and (2) are different;
second, the tenses in (1) and (2) are different;
third, (2) but not (1) may have the complementizer "that".

Reported speech is used to tell to the third party what someone else said in written or spoken conversation. It is used mainly when the direct quote is not required by the context. As it was mentioned earlier, the difference is mostly syntactic.

A reporting verb “says” introduces information acquired from another source. The Present Simple tense of the reporting verb does not introduce any tense changes, though the pronoun was changed from “I” to “he” to express the meaning that someone, not the speaker, provided information.

To understand it let’s have a closer look at reported speech rules and examples.

The rule says that first person pronouns (I, me, us, we, mine, our) in reported speech change into third person pronouns (he, she, it, they, him, his, her, hers, them, their, theirs), if the reporting verb refers to third person pronouns. They do not change if the reporting verb refers to first person pronouns.

The pronoun in the last example does not change as the speaker quotes himself.
However, we can observe another important feature of the reported speech – sequence of tenses.

Here are some examples.

The tense changes based on the reporting verb tense.

In future tenses “will” should be changed to “would”.

Could, should, might and had to do not change.

Modal verbs also face changes.

Occasionally, we don't need to change the present tense into the past if the information in direct speech is still true (but this is only for things which are general facts, and even then usually we like to change the tense):

Reported questions are not different from the reported statements.
The differences are the changing word order and the reporting verb “ask” instead of “say”.
The question verb remains same.

Present simple question is made with 'do' or 'does' so we need to take that away. The direct question is the present simple of 'be'. We make the question form of the present simple of be by inverting (changing the position of) the subject and verb. So, we need to change them back before putting the verb into the past simple.

Here are some more examples:

To report a 'yes / no' question we use “if” or “whether”:

All of these requests mean the same thing, so we don't need to report every word when we tell another person about it.
We simply use 'ask me + to + infinitive':

To report a negative request, use 'not':

In fact, we make this into reported speech in the same way as a request.
We just use 'tell' instead of 'ask':

Sometimes when we change direct speech into reported speech we have to change time expressions too. We don't always have to do this, however. It depends on when we heard the direct speech and when we say the reported speech.

For example:

It's Monday. Julie says "I'm leaving today".
If I tell someone on Monday, I say "Julie said she was leaving today".
If I tell someone on Tuesday, I say "Julie said she was leaving yesterday".
If I tell someone on Wednesday, I say "Julie said she was leaving on Monday".
If I tell someone a month later, I say "Julie said she was leaving that day".