REPORTED SPEECH : WH QUESTIONS PART V

REPORTED SPEECH : WH QUESTIONS

PART V

C/ QUESTIONS

In reporting questions, whether “yes / no” or “wh” questions,

the tense shifts should be applied to any question except

for some sorts of questions with special meanings (requests,

commands, suggestions etc.)

Questions in English normally have a different word order

and some tenses involve the use of “helping verbs” as in

the simple present tense (do / does) and in the simple past

tense (did). And a question always ends with a question mark.

In reported questions, the normal word order of a question

referred to as “subject verb inversion” is reset to the usual

word order of a declarative / affirmative / positive sentence,

which means that the “subject verb inversion” is bypassed.

Additionally, the “helping verbs”, which are needed to ask

questions and of course to make negative sentences, are omitted

from the reported question.

b- WH QUESTIONS

Since we are dealing with questions, the reporting verbs

are “asked”, “wanted to know” and “wondered”.

Let’s have a look again at examples three and four in section 1

(simple present) I used in the previous lesson and turn them into

questions:

The sentences in the examples are:

“My father has a big car.”

“I speak three languages.”

The questions which we can form from the above stated examples are:

“What does your father have?”

“Who has a big car?”

“How many languages do you speak?”

As to the first question which we have just made, it can be reported

as follows:

Rachid asked, “What does your father have?” This is a direct quoted

question.

Rachid asked me what my father had.

Or

Rachid wanted to know what my father had.

Or

Rachid wondered what my father had.

A close look at the reported question will show :

1.That the word order of questions is reverted to normal sentence

word order,

2.The helping verb for making questions in the simple present

“does” is omitted,

3.And the tense shift from simple present to simple past is

applied to the new reported question.

Rachid asked, “How many languages do you speak?” Again this is

a direct quoted question.

Let’s report it.

Rachid asked me how many languages I spoke.

Or

Rachid wanted to know how many languages I spoke.

Or

Rachid wondered how many languages I spoke.


Let’s take another example from the previous lesson.

Look at example four from section five (simple past)

“The students wrote their compositions.”

Let’s ask questions now.

The teacher asked, “What did the students write?”

Of course “their compositions”

The teacher asked, “What did the students do?”

Certainly “wrote their compositions”

The teacher asked, “Who wrote the compositions?”

For sure “the students did”

Let’s take any of these questions and report it.

The teacher asked me / a colleague / a student / what the

students had written.

Another question

The teacher asked what had the students done.

The last question

The teacher wanted to know who had written the compositions.

Some more examples:

“Where do you live?” She wanted to know where I lived

“When do you usually get up?” He asked me when I usually got up.

“Where were you?” My father asked me where I had been.

“How does she look” He asked me how she looked.

“Why did you shout at me?” He wanted to know why I had shouted

at him.