BACKSHIFT IN INDIRECT REPORTING
Indirect speech reporting is characterized by a series of formal features that distinguish it from quoted speech reporting. They have the effect of shifting all deictic elements (personal pronouns, demonstratives, tense and adverbs of time and place) away from direct reference to the speech situation, and instead to the reporting situation, as in the following example (we don’t give all the possible personal pronoun shifts, which depend on context):
‘I want you to drink this juice.’ I/you/he/she said she wanted him/me to drink that juice.
The shifts involved are as follows:
• Personal pronouns in the 1st person, which refer to the speaker, are shifted to 2nd or 3rd person, unless the speaker is reporting him/herself, as in 1 below. The 2nd person pronoun, which refers to the listener, is shifted to 1st or 3rd, according to the identity of the listener, again as in 1.
• Demonstratives and deictic adverbs which refer to the here and now (this, these, here, now) are replaced by more remote forms (that, those, there, then) 1 and 4.
• Verb tenses are ‘back-shifted’ – that is, present forms are replaced by past forms 1, 2, 4, 5. This shift is not obligatory if the described state still holds, as in 3.
• Clause type is also affected. A quoted interrogative with say is replaced by a declarative introduced by ask in reported speech 7. Imperatives and verbless clauses have less clear correspondences.
Verbs used in indirect statements and questions are essentially the same as those used in quoting. The main exceptions are shown in the table.
(a) Verbs such as claim, deny, insinuate represent an interpretation on the part of the reporter of the speech act in the original situation, and can indicate a certain stance, for instance of reservation or disbelief:
She claims her mother was related to a Polish aristocrat.
He denies being involved in the incident.
Are you insinuating that he knows something about it?
(b) The combination of mental processes with a reporting clause is the normal way of representing what people think, believe, hope, want and like. These typically occur as reported states of wishing, wanting, and so on, since such mental states are rarely quoted; even the possible form with let as in ‘Let me be the first to speak to him’, Janet wished is relatively infrequent. Syntactically, they are no different from the complementation patterns:
I hope that no damage has been done
It is feared that many lives have been lost.
She wishes she had never met him.
(c) Conversely, verbs which are not intrinsically verbs of saying are not normally used in indirect reporting. These include verbs of laughing, weeping, and the like. A quoted locution such as ‘So what?’, he sneered would be difficult to report in a similar form, and even perhaps with a similar meaning. A paraphrase such as He asked with a sneer what it mattered might be considered acceptable within a certain context.
