Indirect statement

Indirect statements are one of the three basic structures of reported indirect speech. They are simply the form of a statement (a sentence made using the indicative mood) which is written down without directly transcribing the speaker's words. When the speaker's words are written down as spoken, inside speech marks, it is also reported speech - but direct speech.

An indirect statement is introduced with a reporting clause (such as He said or The Prime Minister announced) ending with the conjunction that, or similar, sometimes a wh-word. (Sometimes this reporting clause interrupts or follows the speech; but usually it introduces it.) Once you have said that it is speech, some transformations have to be made to the structure of the original utterance.

• In person.
  • Where the original speaker uses the 1st person ('I' or 'we', etc), the indirect report uses the 3rd person ('she', 'they', etc).
  • If the speaker originally used the 2nd person (this may not be common in academic English), the indirect report uses the 1st person ('we' or 'I') if the reporter was among those spoken to. If the writer was not present, for example when giving an account of a speech made in historical times, then the 3rd person ('he', 'she' or 'they') should be used
• in tense. The tense of the reported direct speech matches the tense of the reporting clause. If the reporting clause is in the past tense (as it usually is, in formal writing (see historic present), then the tense of the speech reported in the indirect statement is backshifted: it moves to a tense further in the past than the original direct speech.
  • For example, if a speaker says "I love you" in the present tense, this is reported as

He said [past tense] that he [3rd person] loved [backshifted to the past tense] her.

Similarly, "I think [present tense] it will rain [future tense] tomorrow" is reported as

She said [past tense] that she thought [past tense] it would rain [backshifted to the 'future in the past' tense] the next day [[backshifted to a past context]

and "Moses died [past tense] a long time ago" becomes

He observed [past tense] that Moses had died [backshifted to the past perfect tense] a long time previously [backshifted to a past context].

• These two examples show that one has to backshift references to the times of the context of the utterance as well as the tenses of the verbs. Other descriptions in the context also have to be shifted to match, in a way that seems obvious to a native speaker: 'here' becomes 'there', and 'this becomes 'that': "I stand [present] here with my hand on this precious document" becomes

He said [past tense] that he stood [past simple] [or was standing [past continuous] there with his hand on that precious document.