Tense in reported speech
Lesson opening
This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
Tense in reported speech: where do you count from?
“He said he was coming”, “I thought you were at home”, “so yesterday I walk into the office”: in all three, the tense is not counted from the moment you are speaking. The course has touched on this several times. “The tense system in overview” noted that Serbian keeps the tense that was actually used when it reports words; “Direct & indirect speech” showed it in reported statements, “Indirect questions” in questions built into a sentence; and “The pluperfect” put off the question of why Rekao je da je bio zaboravio comes out in English exactly like the plain “he said he had forgotten”. Here it all comes together into one mechanism, simpler than it looks.
The mechanism comes down to one question: from which point is the tense of a verb measured? Usually from the moment you are speaking. But the reference point can move: into someone else’s words, into a story, into another part of the sentence. The form does not change; only the place it is measured from does. A tense measured from another point like this is called relative.
Three reference points, one verb
Run one present tense, radi “works”, through all three cases. The form never changes; only its anchor does.
There is one practical conclusion, and it removes half the difficulty: Serbian does not rebuild the form to suit the reference point. It keeps the tense that would be right at that point and trusts the listener to work out where to measure from. English does rebuild the form: “I work at a bank” turns into “he said he worked at a bank”. Serbian leaves radi alone, and so must you. Look at the second row: the English verb has stepped back, the Serbian one has not.
Reported speech: the tense comes from the speaker’s mouth
The main home of relative tense is the part of a sentence after da “that”, following a verb of saying or thinking (grammars call it a subordinate clause). English applies a rule here that Serbian grammars call slaganje vremena, the sequence of tenses: after a past “said”, the reported verb steps one tense back, so “I am tired” becomes “he said he was tired”. Serbian has no such rule: nothing is moved back. The reference point moves to the moment when the other person’s words were spoken, and the tense after da shows its relation to that moment, not to your own “now”.
The three rows of the table are the whole mechanism. The perfect here is simply the ordinary past tense, and for “earlier” it is the norm; the pluperfect is only an option that pushes the event one step further back (“The pluperfect”). The mechanism serves statements, questions and thoughts alike:
Every English verb has stepped back (were waiting, had left, would, were, needed); no Serbian one has: čekaju, su otišli, ćeš, si, treba are exactly what was said or thought at the time.
The choice of form after da is not decoration: it changes the meaning. Compare this pair:
The present says “at the same time as his question”, the perfect “before it”; nothing is shifted back. English backshift tends to blur the pair into “he asked where I lived”; Serbian keeps them apart. The same mechanism works in the colloquial report with a bare da from the lesson “Advice, bans and hearsay”: Zvao je Marko. Da ne može da dođe. “Marko rang. Says he can’t come.” The words were Ne mogu “I can’t”, and the present tense simply stayed. Javila se Ana. Da je stigla. “Ana got in touch: she’s arrived, she says.” Ana said Stigla sam “I’ve arrived”, and the report keeps the past.
Cheat sheet
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Tense in reported speech: where do you count from?
A tense is measured from a reference point, and the point can move. The form stays the same.
Three cases
Reported speech: no backshift
No sequence of tenses (slaganje vremena): keep the tense of the original words.
- The choice changes the meaning: gde stanujem “where I live now”, gde sam stanovao “where I used to live”.
- Translate by the point, not the form: da dolazi sutra “he was coming tomorrow”; da je bio zaboravio “he had forgotten”.
- Bare da: Zvao je Marko. Da ne može da dođe. Javila se Ana. Da je stigla.
- A time clause keeps its tense too: Rekla je da će se javiti kad stigne.
Forms that need a second point
- pluperfect (pretprošlo vreme): Kad sam došao, već su bili otišli.
- future II (predbuduće vreme): Ako budem imao vremena, javiću ti se.
- perfective present after a conjunction: Kad dođem, zvaću te; “I’m coming now” is Sad ću doći, never “*Sada dođem”
Stories and timeless truths
- narrative present (pripovedački prezent): Prošlog leta ostajem sam u gradu i odlučim da renoviram kuhinju. A book’s background: the imperfect, Padaše kiša.
- historical future: Vuk se rađa 1787, a Rječnik će objaviti tek 1818.
- gnomic present (gnomski prezent), properties, instructions: Ko drugome jamu kopa, sam u nju pada. Moja sestra govori pet jezika. Testo se mesi deset minuta.