Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Indirect speech. 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. In fiction, the "utterance" might amount to ...
t. e. Indirect speech, also known as reported speech, indirect discourse (US), or ōrātiō oblīqua (/ əˈreɪʃɪoʊ əˈblaɪkwə / or / oʊˈrɑːtɪoʊ ɒˈbliːkwə /), [1] is the practice, common in all Latin historical writers, of reporting spoken or written words indirectly, using different grammatical forms. Passages of indirect ...
Free indirect speech is the literary technique of writing a character's first-person thoughts in the voice of the third-person narrator. It is a style using aspects of third-person narration conjoined with the essence of first-person direct speech. The technique is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in French ...
Reported questions (as in the last of the examples) are also subject to the tense and other changes that apply generally in indirect speech. For more information see interrogative mood and English grammar. Indirect questions can serve as adjective and noun complements. Here, in English, they are generally introduced by a preposition, especially ...
Since such questions imply a command, they can function as a command in dialogue, an act of commanding in saying (illocution), thus such speech acts are called 'indirect speech acts' because they do not map onto the imperative mode of representing events. This section covers only 'direct speech acts' in primary tense whereby a command in saying ...
– Direct question; do-support introduced c. Nobody knows why Larry stayed home. – Indirect question. In indirect questions, while the interrogative is still fronted to the first position of the clause, the subject is instead placed in second position, and the verb appears in third position, forming a V3 word order.
At the level of pragmatics, a question is an illocutionary category of speech act which seeks to obtain information from the addressee. [1] At the level of syntax, the interrogative is a type of clause which is characteristically associated with questions, and defined by certain grammatical rules (such as subject–auxiliary inversion in ...
The notion of an illocutionary act is closely connected with Austin's doctrine of the so-called 'performative' and 'constative utterances': an utterance is "performative" if, and only if it is issued in the course of the "doing of an action" (1975, 5), by which, again, Austin means the performance of an illocutionary act (Austin 1975, 6 n2, 133).