Reported speech.

Students just make mechanical drills, but what they are doing has nothing in common

with the way we report things in real life.

What grammars tell us.

present tenses become past; I may become he or she; my may become his or her.

When the indirect speech is perceived as referring to the past, the tense in the reported clause usually
changes to a past form of the tense of the original speech. This process is known as tense backshift.

Coursebooks regularly produce guidance of this kind. explaining that yesterday may become the
prelvious day and so on.

However, there are three problems with these formulations:

1. If we cannot recall the tense used in the original, how can we possibly shift it back into the past?
2. They imply that there is something unusual about the way in which we use tenses in reported
speech.
3. They can become extremely complex. If it is reported on Wednesday 7 th April, then it would
probably be reported as today.

A false assumption

The rules given for reported speech are based on the assumption that we recall exactly what was said
on a given occasion and then go through a process of ‘tense backshift'.