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The indirect speech sentence is then ambiguous since it can be a result of two different direct speech sentences. For example: I can get it for free. OR I could get it for free. He said that he could get it for free. (ambiguity) However, in many Slavic languages, there is no change of tense in indirect speech and so there is no ambiguity.
The first four the verbs in the last example above are perfect subjunctive, which in an indirect question may represent an imperfect, perfect, or pluperfect tense in the original speech. The last verb ignōrāre is an infinitive, since it is a rhetorical question resembling a statement ('there is none of us who doesn't know') more than a question.
Reported questions (as in the last of the examples) are also subject to the tense and other changes that apply generally in indirect speech. For more information see interrogative mood and English grammar. Indirect questions can serve as adjective and noun complements. Here, in English, they are generally introduced by a preposition, especially ...
A complement of a verbum dicendi can be direct or indirect speech. Direct speech is a single unit of linguistic object that is '"mentioned" rather than used.' [1] In contrast, indirect speech is a proposition whose parts make semantic and syntactic contribution to the whole sentence just like parts of the matrix clause (i.e. the main clause/sentence, as opposed to an embedded clause).
Indirect speech acts are commonly used to reject proposals and to make requests. For example, if a speaker asks, "Would you like to meet me for coffee?" and the other replies, "I have class", the second speaker has used an indirect speech act to reject the proposal.
For example, in English and some other languages, indirect questions are formed without inversion of subject and verb (compare the word order in "where are they?" and "(I wonder) where they are"). Indirect questions may also be subject to the changes of tense and other changes that apply generally to indirect speech .
Free indirect discourse can be described as a "technique of presenting a character's voice partly mediated by the voice of the author". In the words of the French narrative theorist Gérard Genette, "the narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two instances then are merged". [1]
Indirect questions (or interrogative content clauses) are subordinate clauses used within sentences to refer to a question (as opposed to direct questions, which are interrogative sentences themselves). An example of an indirect question is where Jack is in the sentence "I wonder where Jack is."