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In linguistics, speech or indirect discourse is a grammatical mechanism for reporting the content of another utterance without directly quoting it. For example, the English sentence Jill said she was coming is indirect discourse while Jill said "I'm coming" would be direct discourse.
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]
A present infinitive in indirect speech usually represents a situation contemporaneous with the introductory verb, whether the main verb is present or past tense. In the following examples, the verb in direct speech would have been present tense (e.g. hostēs adsunt): hostēs adesse nūntiātum est (Livy) [136]
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).
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. This is indirect because the literal meaning of "I have class" does not entail any sort of rejection. [citation needed]
This is because indirect speech can be a paraphrase; it is not a direct quote, and in the course of any composition, it is important to document when one is using a quotation versus when one is just giving content, which may be paraphrased, and which could be open to interpretation. For example, if Hal says: "All systems are functional", then ...
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In Turkish, direct speech is marked by following it by a form of the verb demek ("to say"), [11] as in 'Hastayım' dedi. 'I am ill', he said. In particular, the word diye (literally "saying"), a participle of demek, is used to mark quoted speech when another verb of utterance than demek is needed: 'Hastayım mı?' diye sordu. 'Am I ill?', he asked.