Indirect Statement
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Indirect Statement
In English, there are two ways to report what someone says. We can report it directly by using quotations or we can report it indirectly by paraphrasing it. Consider the following examples:
- Direct Statement: The students said, “We like Latin.”
- Indirect Statement: The students said that they like Latin.
- Direct Statement: She said, “Pizza is the best food.”
- Indirect Statement: She said that pizza is the best food.
Note how in the indirect statement, there are three major components to the sentence:
- a head verb as the main verb. By “head verb”, we mean a verb that you can perform with your head or a part of your head, like your mouth; thus, “to say”, “to think”, “to see”, etc.
- the bridge word “that”
- the indirect statement itself. If we were to pull the indirect statement out of the sentence, it would make sense as a thought in and of itself (“They like Latin.” “Pizza is the best food.”). However, here, these thoughts are being reported through someone’s perception.
How do we differentiate between what someone actually said or thought and an indirect report of what they said or thought in Latin? The answer is that we change the form that we use for the subject and main verb of the statement. When we directly replicate what was actually said, we follow the nominative subject and finite verb pattern that we have already met this semester and can use quotation marks to report those words directly.
- Dixit, “pater amavit filias.”
- He said, “The father loved his daughters.”
But to indicate that we are paraphrasing what the speaker said, we use the accusative to represent the subject of the indirect statement and an infinitive as the verbal action of the indirect statement.
- Dixit patrem amāre filiās.
- He said that the father loved his daughters.
Thus, we can recognize indirect statement by the use of an accusative subject and an infinitive following the sentence’s main verb. (Be sure to review infinitive formation.)
While the main verb in these constructions is often a verb of speaking (e.g. dicō, dicere, dixī, dictus, “to say, speak”), indirect statements in Latin can also be introduced by any head verb, again defined as a verb for any action you can do with your head (e.g., speaking, thinking, learning, perceiving, believing, seeing, agreeing).
Here are some examples of indirect statements with different examples of verbs of the head (bolded):
- Credēbat patrem amāre filiās. (“He was believing that the father loved his daughters.”)
- Vīdit patrem amāre filiās. (“He saw that the father loved his daughters.”)
- Didicit patrem amāre filiās. (“He learned that the father loved his daughters.”)
- Cognōvit patrem amāre filiās. (“He recognized that the father loved his daughters.”)
In all of these sentences, notice that we have an accusative direct object in addition to the accusative subject and infinitive as the verb. Because we can’t necessarily use Latin word order to determine meaning, you may have to use context clues to determine which accusative is the subject and which accusative is the direct object.
For example, in the last sentence (cognovit patrem amāre fīliās), if the context calls for it, it would be just as correct to translate the sentence as “He recognized that the daughters loved their father.”
Time in Indirect statement
When we first learned about tense, we learned that it tells us when the verb’s action occurred. We must now make a further distinction when it comes to tense, because the tense of a finite/conjugated verb (i.e., a verb with a person and a numer) tells us something different than the tense of an infinitive.
The tense of a finite/conjugated verb is absolute. That means that tenses like present, perfect, and future have a distinct time at which they were performed. For example, rexit, perfect tense, means that the action of ruling occurred in the past; meanwhile, reget, future tense, means that the action of ruling will occur in the future.
The tense of an infinitive, on the other hand, is relative to the tense of the main verb. That means that instead of thinking about, e.g., the present tense as “now” and the perfect tense as “past”, we need to think about when the action of the infinitive occurs in relationship to the main verb of the sentence. Note the following chart:
| Tense of Infinitive | Relationship to Main Verb |
|---|---|
| present | same time |
| perfect | completed before |
| [future] | [after] |
This means that while a present infinitive can indicate an action happening now in an indirect statement, it only does so if the main verb is happening now (i.e., is present tense). For example:
- dux videt nautās ē nāvibus venīre. The leader sees that the sailors are coming out of the ships.
Similarly, a perfect infinitive acts as we might expect it to if the main verb is happening now; it will indicate an action that occurred in the past because the action of the infinitive is completed by the time the action of the main verb occurs:
- dux videt nautās ē nāvibus vēnisse. The leader sees that the sailors came out of the ships.
What happens, though, if we pair a present infinitive, which happens at the same time as the main verb, with a past tense main verb?
- dux vīdit nautās ē nāvibus venīre.
If the action of the infinitive occurs at the same time as a past tense main verb (in this case, the perfect tense vīdit), that means that that infinitive action must occur in the past as well:
- The leader saw that the sailors came out of the ships.
And this despite the fact that the infinitive is in the present tense. Again, the tense of an infinitive is relative, rather than absolute.
This has further implications for another combination of infinitive tense and main verb tense. If we have a perfect infinitive paired with a past tense main verb, note that English (and Latin) have a specific verb form to indicate a past action that occurred before another action in the past. This is called the pluperfect tense, and it uses the helping verb “had” with the past participle (or “-ed” form) of the verb:
- dux vīdit nautās ē nāvibus vēnisse. The leader saw that the sailors had come out of the ships.
In this case, the action of coming out of the ships had happened before the action of the leader seeing; thus, we need to make that relativity of time clear.