Indirect speech

In linguistics, speech or indirect discourse is a grammatical mechanism for reporting the content of another utterance without directly quoting it. For example, the English sentence Jill said she was coming is indirect discourse while Jill said "I'm coming" would be direct discourse. In fiction, the "utterance" might amount to an unvoiced thought that passes through a stream of consciousness, as reported by an omniscient narrator. In many languages, indirect discourse is expressed using a content clause or infinitival. When an instance of indirect discourse reports an earlier question, the embedded clause takes the form of an indirect question. In indirect speech, in the embedded clause often differ from those in the utterance it reports. For instance, the example above uses the third person pronoun "she" even though Jill's original utterance used the first person pronoun "I". In some languages, including English, the tense of verbs can also be changed following the sequence of tense. Some languages also have a change of mood. For instance Latin indirect speech uses the infinitive for statements and the subjunctive for questions. In indirect speech, words generally have referents appropriate to the context in which the act of reporting takes place, rather than that in which the speech act being reported took place (or is conceived as taking place). The two acts often differ in a reference point (origo) – the point in time and place and the person speaking – and also in the person being addressed and the linguistic context. Thus when a sentence involves words or forms whose referents depend on these circumstances, they are liable to change when the sentence is put into indirect speech. In particular, this commonly affects: personal pronouns, such as I, you, he, we, and the corresponding verb forms (in pro-drop languages the meaning of the pronoun may be conveyed solely by verb inflection). demonstratives, such as this and that. phrases of relative time or place such as now, yesterday and here.