As a form of
transcription, direct or quoted speech is spoken or written text that reports speech or thought in its original form phrased by the original speaker. In
narrative
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional ( fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc. ...
, it is usually enclosed in
quotation marks,
but it can be enclosed in
guillemet
Guillemets (, also , , ) are a pair of punctuation marks in the form of sideways double chevrons, and , used as quotation marks in a number of languages. In some of these languages "single" guillemets, and , are used for a quotation inside a ...
s (« ») in some languages. The cited speaker either is mentioned in the tag (or attribution) or is implied.
Comparison between direct, indirect, and free indirect speech
* Quoted or direct speech:
:He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And just what pleasure have I found since I came into this world?" he asked.
* Reported or normal
indirect speech
In linguistics, indirect speech (also reported speech or indirect discourse) is a grammatical mechanism for reporting the content of another utterance without directly quoting it. For example, the English sentence ''Jill said she was coming' ...
:
:He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the world.
*
Free indirect speech
Free indirect speech is a style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech; it is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in ...
:
:He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found since he came into this world?
A crucial semantic distinction between direct and indirect speech is that direct speech purports to report the exact words that were said or written, whereas indirect speech is a representation of speech in one's own words.
The distinction between indirect speech and free indirect speech is mostly one of style, hence free indirect speech is sometimes described as a free indirect style.
Notes
See also
*
Quotation marks in English
*
Third-person narrative
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the ...
References
{{reflist, refs=
[{{Cite book, pages=861–865, last1=Huddleston , first1=Rodney , authorlink1=Rodney Huddleston, last2= Pullum , first2= Geoffrey , authorlink2=Geoffrey Pullum, title=The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , date=2002 , publisher=Cambridge University Press , location=Cambridge; New York , isbn=0-521-43146-8]
[{{Cite book, quote=Direct reported speech purports to give the actual wording of the original, whereas indirect reported speech gives only its content. ... ote:Some writers omit the 'reported' and simply talk of 'direct speech' and 'indirect speech', while others restrict the term 'reported speech' to the indirect type; we believe, however, that it is useful to have a term for covering both. Further alternative terms for direct and indirect reported speech are 'oratio recta' and 'oratio obliqua', respectively. , pages=1023–1030, last1=Huddleston , first1=Rodney , authorlink1=Rodney Huddleston, last2= Pullum , first2= Geoffrey , authorlink2=Geoffrey Pullum, title=The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , date=2002 , publisher=Cambridge University Press , location=Cambridge; New York , isbn=0-521-43146-8]
[{{cite book, page]
34
101 , last1=Leech , first1=Geoffrey, title=A Glossary of English Grammar, url=https://archive.org/details/glossaryenglishg00leec , url-access=limited , year=2006 , publisher=Edinburgh University Press, isbn=978-0-7486-1729-6
Semantics
Semantic units
Syntactic entities