This is in reply to your posting previous to the one above, but I think it will also apply to the matter you raised in your most recent posting:
In language, context always reigns. In the case of reported speech, in particular, the tense of the reported clause should be faithful to the intended sense at the time it was uttered. This is regardless of whether the verb in the reporting clause is in the present tense, which requires no back-shifting of the verb in the reported clause, or in the other tenses, where the general rule is to make the verb shift one tense back into the past. I have discussed the mechanics of reported speech in several postings in the Forum over the years and by way of review, you can check them out by simply clicking the two links that I will be providing at the end of this posting of mine.
To avoid confusion, however, we need to make it clear in our mind that reported speech or indirect speech is the kind of sentence someone—
a known and declared speaker—makes when reporting what someone else has said. I say this because the four sentences that you presented in your posting are, strictly speaking, not reported speech. To begin with, the speaker in “She said she still loves him” is not reporting what someone else had said; it is simply an unattributed third-person statement about a woman declaring something she had in mind at the point of speaking; it would be reported speech if the statement were of the form “She told me that she still loves him” or “I heard her whisper that she still loves him,” where someone else is recounting what she (
the speaker) had said. For the same reason, “Archie said he is a teacher” is, strictly speaking, also not reported speech but just a third-person statement about a particular “Archie” declaring his vocation, as told by an unknown or undeclared reporter; it would be reported speech if the statement were of the form “Archie told us that he is a teacher” or “We heard Archie say that he is a teacher,” where the reporter is clearly identified.
Indeed, for reported speech to be reported speech, it requires someone (
the speaker) who says something (
the reported statement) to somebody (
the person or audience being addressed) or to nobody in particular (
perhaps the statement was just an outburst of feeling), and another person (
the reporter) who heard the speaker make the statement and is now recounting, whether in written or spoken form, what he or she had heard or listened to (
the reported speech). Structurally, reported speech needs an explicit reporter using an explicit reporting verb to tell, typically in his or her own words (
a paraphrase), what was said or done by someone else. A good, clear-cut example of such speech is this: “Our professor told us this morning that he would not accept term papers submitted later than this coming Friday” or “We were told by our professor this morning that he would not accept term papers submitted later than this coming Friday” This is the kind of statement that qualifies as reported speech, the grammatical form that typically paraphrases those utterances and applies what’s known as
the normal sequence-of-tenses rule for reported speech to the reported statement—a rule that I must emphasize needs thorough mastery before it can be applied with confidence and finesse.
So if the statements “She said she still loves him” and “Archie said he is a teacher” are not reported speech, what could they be? I’d say that they are more in the nature of third-person narrative statements by an undeclared or unknown reporter. The same is also true for the two other examples you presented, “Martha said she has rheumatic heart disease” and “Michael said that his cousin has blue eyes”; they would formally fall under the realm of reported speech only if constructed like, say, “Martha admitted to me that she has rheumatic heart disease” and “Michael told the police that his cousin has blue eyes.” Indeed, when presented in a form without a formal attribution to a reporter or source, such statements are the stuff that most contemporary print third-person news reporting and third-person fictional narratives are made of, where the reporter or narrator (a) deliberately detaches himself or herself from the reported material to indicate non-involvement in it; (b) typically doesn’t bother with grammatical devices like a reporting clause or a reporting verb, and (c) much less—and only very rarely at that—take recourse to such conventions as the back shifting of tenses. The reporter or narrator in such cases assumes the role of an absent yet omniscient storyteller. (In featurized reporting, for example, news writers sometimes even take the literary liberty of using the present tense in reporting events that clearly happened in the past.)
I trust that this explanation will at least lessen your perplexity over the complexities of reported speech and the back-shifting of verbs that it often requires.
READINGS ON REPORTED SPEECH:Going back to the basic forms of reported speechReported speech needs advanced grammar skills and a quick mind
