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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.
Free indirect discourse can be described as a "technique of presenting a character's voice partly mediated by the voice of the author". In the words of the French narrative theorist Gérard Genette, "the narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two instances then are merged". [1]
Indirect speech, also known as reported speech, indirect discourse (US), or ōrātiō oblīqua (/ ə ˈ r eɪ ʃ ɪ oʊ ə ˈ b l aɪ k w ə / or / oʊ ˈ r ɑː t ɪ oʊ ɒ ˈ b l iː k w ə /), [1] is the practice, common in all Latin historical writers, of reporting spoken or written words indirectly, using different grammatical forms.
For example, if a speaker asks, "Would you like to meet me for coffee?" and the other replies, "I have class", the second speaker has used an indirect speech act to reject the proposal. This is indirect because the literal meaning of "I have class" does not entail any sort of rejection. [citation needed]
A complement of a verbum dicendi can be direct or indirect speech. Direct speech is a single unit of linguistic object that is '"mentioned" rather than used.' [1] In contrast, indirect speech is a proposition whose parts make semantic and syntactic contribution to the whole sentence just like parts of the matrix clause (i.e. the main clause/sentence, as opposed to an embedded clause).
the speech act may be reported using the following words: Batman said that he needed a special key for the Batmobile. with the present tense need replaced by the past tense needed, since the main verb of saying (said) is in the past tense. Further examples can be found at Uses of English verb forms § Indirect speech.
Free indirect discourse is also in Jane Austen's Emma. Free indirect discourse is in all of Austen's work, have added a brief reference to her status as 'first' FID user, this could be elaborated with examples. Have tried to make the specification of FID more accurate too, but needs more work. --looceefir 23:04, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
For the use of the past tense in indirect speech and similar contexts, see § Indirect speech below. The -ed ending of regular verbs is pronounced as follows: Regular verb endings with voiced consonants + /d/, e.g. hugged /hʌɡd/. Regular verb endings with unvoiced consonants + /t/, stopped /stɒpt/.