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Direct and indirect speech

§ 524. Among the composite sentences of English and other languages we find a peculiar type differing from the rest.

Cf. He said, "/ love you". (Greene). ,

He said he loved her. ~~

The first sentence is traditionally called direct speech, the second sentence — indirect speech.

Usually direct speech is defined as "the exact words of the speaker" 1. But this definition is unsatisfactory in several ways.

1. It is not grammatical. It does not say anything about the syntactical structure of the sentence. No wonder, there­ fore, that some authors 2 use the term 'direct speech' in reference to all kinds of utterances:

To-morrow morning I leave England.

This is the last time I shall ever look on you. •

"So you, too, are leaving London?" I remarked.

2. 'Exactness' is no criterion. We do not and need not check up whether the words used are exactly those somebody said, especially since that 'somebody' may be an imaginary

1 See M. Ganshina, N. Vasilevskaya, op cit., p. 330.; В. Л. К а- ушанская and others, op. cit., p. 299.

2 See, for instance, И. П. И в а н о в a, op. cit., p. 86.

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person. What matters is not exactness but the way the words are presented.

§ 525. There is no agreement as to the syntactical nature of a sentence like He said, "I love you".

Some linguists regard it as a simple sentence in which the "quotation part" functions as a secondary part of the sentence *. Others 2 interpret it as a complex sentence in which the quota­tion serves as an object clause. Some authors treat it as a com­pound sentence 3.

We fully agree with those 4 who think that direct speech is a peculiar syntactical unit which should not be equated with any of the above mentioned types of sentences.

• § 526. Let us compare the two sentences:

He said, "I love you". He said he loved her.

Each of them contains two predications, so they are com­posite sentences, but the relation between the predications is different.

The predications of the second sentence have, as it were, one common centre. For both of them the first person is the author who uttered or wrote the sentence. The moment he did it is the moment of speech in regard to which the two ac­tions (of "saying" and "loving") are in the past.

The predications of the first sentence have separate centres: different first persons and different moments of speech. The introductory part of this sentence (He said, "...") serves to indicate the shifting of the centre of predication. The pronoun he points out who will be regarded as the first person in the quotation, and the verb said shows that the moment of speech is shifted to the past.

Thus direct speech can be defined as a syntactical unit containing two centres of predication. We use the term unit,

1 H. Fowler. On Grammatical Inversion in Dialogue Machinery. Oxford, 1919.

2E. В. Васильева. Бессоюзное подчинение в литературном языке 17 ст., дисс., Л., 1955.

3Винокурова. Грамматика английского языка. М., 1954.

4 В. И. К о д у х о в. Способы передачи чужого высказывания «Уч. зап ЛГПИИЯ», т. 104, Л., 1955; Р. Г. М у х а. К вопросу о прямой речи. «Уч. зап. ХПИИЯ», т. V, 1959.

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not sentence, because the quotation, may contain several sen­tences.

He said, "If it had been warmer, we could have slept out here. You'd think we might have had that much luck, to-night of all nights. But it's cold and it's going to rain." (Greene).