Author Topic: The choice between direct quotes and reported speech  (Read 1784 times)

Joe Carillo

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The choice between direct quotes and reported speech
« on: June 25, 2017, 05:39:02 PM »
A reader, Mark Lopez, asked me a very interesting grammar question about the tense usage in a direct quote of a news story that I critiqued in Jose Carillo’s English Forum on August 21 in 2010. The story was about a horse and zebra mating at the Manila Zoo to produce a rare offspring that’s called a “hebra.”



The story directly quoted a zoo official as saying:

“A very rare occurrence had happened in Manila Zoo last week as our zebra had finally gave birth to a hebra. Though the fawn (this should be “foal” instead) may look healthy and active now, we are still monitoring its health.”

I corrected the erroneous rendering of the past perfect “had finally gave birth to a hebra” to “had finally given birth to a hebra,” using the past participle “given” instead of the simple past “gave.” This, I explained, is the proper way to form the past perfect.

Obviously bothered by this tense usage, Mark asked why the sentence shouldn’t take the following form instead:

A very rare occurrence happened in Manila Zoo last week when our zebra gave birth to a hebra.”

Here’s my reply to Mark:

Your version, “A very rare occurrence happened in Manila Zoo last week when our zebra gave birth to a hebra,” is the scrupulously grammatical rendition of that direct quote. The main clause, “a very rare occurrence happened in Manila Zoo last week,” is in the simple past tense, and since the action in the subordinate clause, “when our zebra gave birth to a hebra,” was simultaneous with the action in the main clause, that action should also be in the simple past tense. In short, the verbs in the main clause and subordinate clause should both be in the past tense, “happened” and “gave birth.”

When presenting a directly quoted statement, however, we need to make sure that we don’t unduly change the phrasing of the statement as actually uttered by the speaker. This is because when the phrasing of a direct quote is altered significantly, we can no longer present it as a direct quote; it becomes reported speech (my August 21 column took this up; see my end-note at the tail-end of this posting). Indeed, there’s a hard-and-fast rule for situations like this in newspaper reporting: the reporter must paraphrase the direct quote if it won’t be presentable in exactly the same words, perhaps because of bad word choices or faulty phrasing by the speaker that might just confuse the readers.

To make the statement sustainable as a direct quote, I decided to retain the past perfect tense of the verb “give” in the subordinate clause of that direct quote and simply rendered it in its proper form, “had given birth.” This, of course, is a bit of a stretch. It would be grammatically and semantically correct only if we imagine that the mother zebra went into long, hard labor before giving birth to that cute little hebra; in that case, from the standpoint of the zoo official, his use of the past perfect in “our zebra had finally given birth to a hebra” would be justifiable.

But I suppose that a bigger question that’s uppermost in your mind is this: Is it grammatically defensible to render simultaneous, practically identical actions in different tenses, one in the past tense and the other in the past perfect? Absolutely not. In the particular case of the zoo official’s directly quoted statement, though, we have a choice: either make substantial changes in the statement that will force us to present it as reported speech, or just render the past perfect tense correctly so the statement can still be legitimately presented as a direct quote.

Simply for grammar-instruction purposes, I chose the latter, but it’s also likely that a perceptive, English-savvy newspaper editor or desk person would go for the former instead and paraphrase that statement as reported speech. (2010)

This essay, 707th in the series, first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times on September 11, 2010, © 2010 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

MORE GRAMMAR INSIGHTS FROM THAT HEBRA STORY:
“A very serious case of species and animal gender confusion” in my Media English Watch (2010)