Introduction...

Reporting what someone has said 

can be a difficult task in a foreign language.

Utterances can be made the

 subject of the other utterances. 

They can be criticized, questioned, 

commented on, or simply be reported. 

Language can be uses to refer to language. 

We can talk about talk. This is true 

for all natural languages and is, indeed, 

a fundamental feature whose absence 

disqualifies any sign system as a human 

language. However, there are different 

ways of reporting the speech of another.

Direct speech is the exact words that people say. Reported speech (or indirect speech) is how we report the words. 

We make changes when we report what people say, such as to the tense and pronouns. When we report speech, we usually move the verb form one tense back, so present verbs in direct speech become past verbs in reported speech.