Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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).
Some examples of changes in form in indirect speech in English are given below. See also Sequence of tenses, and Uses of English verb forms § Indirect speech. It is raining hard. She says that it is raining hard. (no change) [4] She said that it was raining hard. (change of tense when the main verb is past tense) I have painted the ceiling blue.
Its major syntactic characteristics are the deletion of auxiliary verbs, the frequent use of "-ing" forms for things other than participles, and the reporting of indirect speech directly. For examples: the use of the present participle for the future tense: I telling rather than the Standard English "I will tell"
the speech act may be reported using the following words: Batman said that he needed a special key for the Batmobile. with the present tense need replaced by the past tense needed, since the main verb of saying (said) is in the past tense. Further examples can be found at Uses of English verb forms § Indirect speech.
Indirect speech, also known as reported speech, indirect discourse (US), or ōrātiō oblīqua (/ ə ˈ r eɪ ʃ ɪ oʊ ə ˈ b l aɪ k w ə / or / oʊ ˈ r ɑː t ɪ oʊ ɒ ˈ b l iː k w ə /), [1] is the practice, common in all Latin historical writers, of reporting spoken or written words indirectly, using different grammatical forms.
One example: Chinese: 妈妈骑马马慢妈妈骂马; pinyin: māma qí mǎ, mǎ màn, māma mà mǎ; lit. 'Mother is riding a horse... the horse is slow... mother scolds the horse'. [37] Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den: poem of 92 characters, all with the sound shi (in four different tones) when read in Modern Standard Mandarin
One common way of performing speech acts is to use an expression, which indicates one speech act, and indeed performs this act, but also performs a further speech act, which is indirect. One may, for instance, say, "Peter, can you close the window?", thereby asking Peter whether he will be able to close the window, but also requesting that he ...
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]