ABSTRACT
Reported (or Indirect) Speech is the term used to describe a set of conventions by which we express what someone is supposed to have said or thought. The temporal and spatial references, word order, degree of formality, as well as the pronouns and some adverbs, tend to differ from those in the postulated ‘original’ direct speech. However, as a study of the reported speech in any novel shows, there is often no one-to-one correlation between direct and reported speech:
Some stylisticians have criticised the oversimplistic dichotomy and argued for a continuum between direct and reported speech.
