> >> Reported speech

THE GRAMMAR POINT from Go English no109

Reported speech (B2-C1)

There are two ways to talk about something that someone else has said. The first is to use direct quotes, along with a reporting verb. Grammatically, this is very straightforward:

“We don’t want people getting injured. Weight has a lot to do with, you know, your knees, your ankles and things like that,” he said.

The other way to talk about what someone has said is to use reported speech. When we use reported speech, we are paraphrasing what the other person is saying – in other words, we are using different words to describe another person’s words, rather than the words that person had originally used.

The reported tense dance: One step back

Grammatically, this can be a little more complicated, and requires a tense shuffle. To be clear, when we use reported speech, we always shift the tense of what the person is saying ‘back by one’, in other words one tense back. In the example above, the verb ‘don’t’ is in the present tense. If we use reported speech, the verb has to now be conjugated in the past tense:

“We don’t want people getting injured.”

→ He said that they didn’t want people getting injured.

Below is a table indicating how tenses transform when we are using reported speech.

Tense in direct speech

Present simple (for state verbs)
Present continuous Present perfect
Present perfect continuous Future with ‘will’
Future with ‘is going to’

Full modals*

Tense in reported speech

Simple past
Past continuous
Past perfect
Past perfect continuous ‘Would’
Future in the past (‘was going to’)
No change

*Note that modals such as shall, may, might, should, etc., do not have past forms, and so remain the same in reported speech. Partial modals (e.g., can, will, etc.) do have past forms, and shift to those forms in reported speech.

Truth in past, truth in present

The exception to the above rule (obviously, in English, there must be at least one exception to any rule!) is facts that the speaker feels are true now as well as in the past.

“Weight has a lot to do with, you know, your knees, your ankles and things like that.”
→ He said that weight has a lot to do with, you know, your knees, your ankles and things like that.

Present tense for repeated actions

As noted previously, statements in the present tense take the simple past form in reported speech – but only if those verbs are state verbs (ex: ‘to have’, ‘to be’, ‘to understand’, etc.). For action verbs, we usually use ‘would’ plus the infinitive without ‘to’ of the verb. This verb form is used to talk about repetitive actions in the past – just as the present simple is used to talk about repetitive actions in the present.

“As the sun rises, I rise as well.”

→ She said that as the sun would rise, she would rise as well.

Questions: Open or closed

Reporting questions can be divided into two types: closed questions and open questions. Closed questions are questions with only one possible answer; the most common type are yes/no questions, but they also include questions where one is asking to choose one option over another. Open questions can have many different answers, and usually include a question word such as ‘where’, ‘who’, ‘why’, etc.

When reporting closed questions, we usually put ‘if’ in front of the subject. The question itself gets transformed into a statement, with the subject going before the verb rather than after the verb.

“Is Voodoo a cult?”

→ Many people ask if Voodoo is a cult.

For open questions, instead of ‘if’, we put the question word in front of the subject. Just as with closed questions, the word order changes in order for the question to become a statement. This can result in strange-seeming constructions, with the conjugated verb at the very end of the sentence, but don’t worry – it’s correct!

“Who is LaToya Cantrell?”

→ They asked who LaToya Cantrell is.

Article by Mohamed Oummih

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