Azar’s statement reflects modern-day usage, especially in conversation,
but also in written usage, except for formal style. The past perfect
is being used less and less as time goes by, and the simple past (or
even the simple present) is being widely used in its place. Here are
some examples from the World Wide Web:
| (a) |
Tony said that he went to the
budget meeting last week and let them know that the Personnel
Committee was requesting a little more money
for advertising purposes.
|
| (b) |
He once said that he went to
college for 25 cents a day, counting the trip back and forth on
the subway and a sandwich at a deli.
|
| (c) |
Xiao Xue, just turned twenty, is a student of the history of
art. She said that she began
to practice "Falun Gong" when she was
in high school.
|
| (d) |
He said that they arrived at
the Sun City Hotel and about an hour later there was
a knock on the door and there she was.
|
As Burkhard Leuschner points out, the example
sentence “I said that Paul went to the movies yesterday”
is too artificial and too devoid of a context to serve as a test case
for whether to “backshift” the verb —that is, to shift
“backwards” from the past to the past perfect in the dependent
clause. In real life, reporting what someone has said takes place in
real time, in real situations. The reporting verb —say,
tell, etc. — appears in the appropriate tense. Now, if
the reporting is anchored in a clearly past situation, the verb(s) in
the dependent clause may be (but does not always have to be) backshifted.
[link to 00011b.html]
Consider the direct conversation below, and then the two scenarios
that follow.
Direct speech (actual conversation in the supermarket):
Bart: Hi, Cindy. How are you? Any word about Jay’s Himalayan
expedition?
Cindy: Yes, he called this morning and told
me that everything is ready for the climb.
Reported speech (What Bart reported about this conversation
in the supermarket—the last line of each scenario):
Scenario 1:
Bart: Hi, Alice. I saw Jay’s sister Cindy at the supermarket
about an hour ago.
Alice: Oh, any word about his Himalayan expedition?
Bart: Yes, she said he called yesterday morning and told her that
everything is ready for the climb.
If the act of reporting is seen as still “fresh” and part
of the present time frame, even though the tense of the original verb
was past, the dependent material can be—and often is—left
unchanged. In fact, in this scenario changing the verb forms of called
and told to the past perfect would be unnatural.
Scenario 2:
Bart: Hi, Alice. I saw Jay’s sister Cindy
at the supermarket last Friday
afternoon.
Alice: Oh, any word about his Himalayan expedition?
Bart: Yes, she said he had called that
morning and told her that everything was
ready for the climb.
In this scenario, Cindy’s reporting was clearly in a past situation.
Bart’s words are about a situation that is somewhat remote in
time, and disconnected from the present.
In Scenario 2, the speaker might use the past perfect—had
called and (had) told—in the dependent
clause.
* * *
In conversations and in informal written discourse, the past tense,
not the past perfect, is used for the reported material. In formal written
discourse, however, the past perfect is still used, especially when
there is a possibility of misunderstanding about the time of the reported
event.
So, choosing the appropriate verb tense depends on many factors: (1)
the “freshness” of the reporting, (2) the mode of communication,
whether spoken or written, and (3) the level of formality or informality.
No single form fits all cases.
Marilyn Martin
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