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Answers to Unit A8 Exercises

Key to speech and thought presentation activities

Here are the suggested solutions to the practice examples posted towards the end of unit A8:

A

‘I know this trick of yours!’ (FDS)

I know this trick of yours! (FDS – freest form)

She said that she knew that trick of his. (IS)

She knew that trick of his! (FIS)

She spoke of his trickery. (NRS)

 

B

‘Can you get here next week?’ (FDS)

Can you get here next week? (FDS – freest form)

He asked if she could get there the following week. (IS)

Could she get there the following week? (FIS)

He enquired about her plans for the next week (NRS)

 

C

‘Why isn’t John here?’ (FDT)

Why isn’t John here? (FDT – freest form).

She asked herself why JohSn wasn’t there. (IT)

Why wasn’t John there? (FIT)

She pondered John’s absence. (NRT)

Note: the reporting clause in these ‘c’ examples is ‘she asked herself ’ (and not ‘she asked’) suggesting not externalised speech as such but an internalised process more characteristic of thought presentation.

 

D

‘We must leave tonight.’ (FDS)

We must leave tonight. (FDS – freest form)

She said that they had to leave that night. (IS)

They had to leave that night. (FIS)

She stressed the urgency of their time of departure. (NRS)

Note: the NRS form here feels cumbersome – which tends to underscore the point made in A8 about those situations when it is sometimes easier to use an explicit mode of speech presentation.

 

E

‘Help yourselves.’ (FDS)

Help yourselves. (FDS)

He urged them to help themselves. (IS)

He encouraged them to tuck in. (NRS)

Note: This is one of those situations when no FIS form is possible. A higher-order grammatical block is activated here by the verb ‘help’ which is in its imperative (non-finite) form in the original DS example. Imperatives normally have no Subject element (see A3) and so cannot be backshifted to the past tense (which requires a finite Subject-Verb agreement). Although the IS form gets around the problem by making the verb infinitive (‘to help’), the FIS form needs to work with a finite pattern in order to create its backshifted version. It is for this reason that resulting transposition, ‘Helped themselves’, just doesn’t make sense.