Indirect Speech: Reported Speech ((link))

To convert direct speech into reported speech, follow these four primary steps:

Direct: " should finish your homework."

Subject-auxiliary inversion is lost. Wh-words remain, but yes/no questions gain if/whether : Indirect Speech Reported Speech

Deep feature: The choice of reporting verb (say, whisper, exclaim, lie, suggest, insist) frames the original speech with without explicit commentary. Indirect speech is never neutral — it is always re-voicing.

In English, the complementizer that is often optional ( She said she was happy ). This is not trivial. The deep feature is that , unlike languages (e.g., Japanese or Korean) where reported speech requires special evidential markers. To convert direct speech into reported speech, follow

| Surface Feature (Taught in Schools) | Deep Feature (Linguistic Reality) | |--------------------------------------|------------------------------------| | Change pronouns | Shift deictic center from speaker to reporter | | Backshift tenses | Anchor tense to reporting time, with pragmatic exceptions | | Add “that” (optional) | Mark finite clause boundary | | Change “now” to “then” | Relocate temporal origo | | Loss of question inversion | Transform interrogative act into embedded proposition | | Infinitive for commands | Change clause type from imperative to control structure | | — | Choice of reporting verb encodes stance & evidentiality |

Indirect speech can be used with different types of sentences, including: In English, the complementizer that is often optional

Direct: " have lost my wallet."