ABSTRACT
11.1(1). When one wishes to report what someone else says or has said (thinks or has thought)—or what one has said or thought on some previous occasion one-self—two ways are open to one. Either one gives, or purports to give, the exact words: direct speech—but this does not concern us in this volume—or else one adapts the words according to the circumstances in which they are now quoted: indirect speech—and in this the tenses are very often different from what they would have been in direct speech (PG 292 ff.). This is true whether we have dependent speech (introduced by some sentence like "he said that" or "he thought that", etc.) or reported speech (not introduced by some such sentence); the latter kind is by other writers termed "style indirect libre' or "erlebte rede".
