Hi Ahmed,

Thank you for the message, and I’m glad you like the material. This is a good question that is tricky to really be definitive on: grammatically, it will generally always sound most correct to backshift reported speech, but in practice indeed it can still make perfect sense to keep the future tense if the situation is current. I believe in informal language (and an awful lot of reported speech in this situation will be informal) you’d certainly hear speech reported this way, particularly when a future plan is more immediately relevant, or we want to emphasise it will happen. The reason for the backshift, after all, is to make it clear that the speech was accurate at the time of saying it, so for example “John said he would come later today,” tells us it was his intention at the time of speaking, but “John said he will come later today” instead emphasises our current belief that it is going to happen – the backshift is grammatically accurate, but the alternative can also be possible.

I hope this helps!

Phil

HI
Thanks for your weekly grammatical review. I have been following you for some time and also bought one of your books, Advanced Writing Skills. I would like to ask you a separate question regarding tense. Sometimes I still get confused in reporting speech. Do I need to change the reporting speech if the situation is still real?
For example, can I say I spoke with John yesterday, and, he said he’ll be coming today or tomorrow? I’ll stick to changing verbs and say I spoke to John yesterday, and he told me he was coming today or tomorrow.

Regards

Hi John,

Yes, you’re right, I’ll update it now – thanks for spotting that!

Phil

In the third example under Broad or Semi-Negatives, should it not be, “There are very few chocolates left in the box.”?

Hi Andre,

Ah yes, thanks for that addition – good point regarding the regional difference and I do find that quite a strange one for Swan to differentiate, as to me personally (in British English) the perfect tense sounds most natural there and the simple tense unusual. But as he has identified it, I’m sure there are speakers who use the simple tense for the same meaning, and I suppose it can make sense grammatically if we use “to be” to define the time period (e.g. “It is three months since I saw her.” = “The amount of time since I saw her is three months.”).

Best,

Phil