Investigating the College Students’ Errors* in the Area of Direct and Indirect Speech

Abstract

There have been extensive arguments concerning the relationship between direct and indirect speech. This is quite natural, since the discussion of this topic involves such major areas of English grammar as the study of narrative style and the relation between the grammatical category of tense and (actual) time as well as various types of deixis shift which include “person shift”, “time/ place adverbial shift” and “tense shift” (commonly called “backshift” or “sequence of tenses”). This study shows how far the direct and indirect speech can and should be explained by the syntactic rules, and where and how the discourse principles come into play. Some aspects of the relationship between direct and indirect speech have been considered.