Narration/Speech (1): Direct Speech, Indirect Speech, Transformation of Sentences

BASIC ENGLISH 44: Let’s begin with three imaginary situations here to understand the basics of Narration or Speech. Item 1: Suppose you are listening to a pre-election speech given by a powerful leader or you are listening to the same speech being broadcast by a TV channel – what exactly happens here? The politician is the speaker and you are the listener. Item 2: Suppose you are watching a TV news channel reporting on the same speech as delivered by the politician. What exactly happens here? Now, it is the reporter who is speaking to the viewers in the form of reporting. Item 3: Suppose you are reading a newspaper article on the same speech as given by the politician. Like Item No. 2 above, here again, it is an act of reporting. Whereas the first example is a speech, the second and third ones are reports. Try to understand the differences and similarities among the three supposed situations. This is Basic English, Session 44 and we are discussing the Narration or Speech this time. Narration or Speech is the act of reporting something told by somebody else. Certain areas of the English reporting pattern may not agree with the rules of our mother tongues. Hence, extra care is needed to have a workable command over the English rules. We may require 2 or 3 sessions on this since the involvement of pronouns, numbers and the sequence of the tenses come jostling together when we treat this otherwise innocent grammatical category. So let’s discuss some of the basic concepts and technical terms before we try to explain the issue. Narration/Speech: A group of words grammatically viable as a sentence or clause, either written or spoken, that gives a sense of meaning. There are two types of Speeches – Direct Speech and Indirect Speech. Direct Speech contains the exact words spoken by the speaker whereas Indirect Speech is a kind of summary of the Direct Speech. In both cases, the reporter is someone else other than the actual speaker of the speech. There are normally two clauses in such grammatical categories – the Reporting Speech and the Reported Speech. The verb in the Reporting Speech is known as the Reporting Verb and the Reported Speech in the Direct Narration is put within quotation marks preceded by a comma at the end of the Reporting Speech. The Reported Speech in the Indirect Narration is introduced by ‘that’. This is the introductory session on the topic and some more sessions are required to discuss other important issues regarding the transformation of speech – from Direct Speech to Indirect Speech or the other way round. All copyrights reserved. No part of the video can be copied, transmitted, transferred or used in any possible form without prior permission from the proprietor. Contact [email protected]