Juan

REPORTED SPEECH



What is Reported Speech?



It is a structure used when a speaker wants to say what he/she has heard, or what somebody has told him/her.



To build Reported Speech,there are two possibilities:



1. To say or report the words exactly in the same way as somebody has declared them, without changing anything. This is called “DIRECT SPEECH”.



In writtenEnglish, for the Direct Speech, the words have to be placed in quotation marks.

For example:



Andrea: “I want to go to the movies with Jim.”



Now, a speaker must report Andrea’s wordslike this:



Andrea said, “I want to go to the movies with Jim.”



2. To say or report the words not exactly as somebody has declared them, and without quotation marks for the writtenEnglish. This is called “INDIRECT SPEECH, or REPORTED SPEECH”.



For example:



Andrea: “I want to go to the movies with Jim.”



Now, a speaker must report Andrea’s words like this:Andrea said (that) she wanted to go to the movies with Jim.”



Note that compared to the original sentence, “I want to go to the movies with Jim”, the sentence in reported speech has somechanges. The pronoun “I”, is she in the reported speech, and the verb in Present Simple “want”, is wanted, in the reported sentence. This means that the pronouns, some reference words and the tenses changewhen a speaker wants to build a sentence in reported speech.



The following is the rule for the tenses in reported speech:



Present Simple Past Simple

Present ProgressivePast Progressive

Past Simple Past Simple/Past Perfect

Present Perfect Past Perfect

will would

is/are Going to was/were Going to

can could

maymight

must must/had to

would would

could could

should should

might might

Past Perfect Past Perfect



This rule of tenses...