Reported Speech in Spanish - Part Two

We left off last week with the following question: “What tense is the subject Yo in and how do you refer to the past, present and future in that context?” The answer to that question is “Ahora”. Take a look below to find a small chart that shows how tenses shift when repeating a message from the past.

Spanish Tenses

This all seems pretty reasonable and it shouldn’t be too much of a problem for students. Remember that when repeating information from the recent past (“Ha dicho que…”) tense markers don’t change beyond the limits of common sense and logic. Diving right into the question of tense, we shouldn’t forget that one of the functions of the verb is to mark the tense in which the action develops, and that brings us right to the point we’re looking at today. Most learning manuals present a chart that shows changes made in tense when reporting speech made in the past that looks like this:

This is all fine but it forces the student to trust what the Spanish teacher or book is saying and memorize each tense.

Since I like to make most of what I teach in Spanish class follow some type of logic, I try to take it one step farther by going back to our question and answer game, which we’ve already used to explain the changes made to the subject and to the deictic elements este, ese and aquel.

We must also remember that when repeating what someone else has said, we don’t want to change the meaning of the message, we just want to take a step back in time so the listener clearly understands that the information is not part of that which is being told in the present but a reference to the past. So… why does the present change to the imperfect? Remember the type of information that the present transmits: habitual actions, actions in progress, and descriptions. Since we have to jump back in time, is there another Spanish verb form that’s used to provide the same type of information, but in the past? Yes, the imperfect.

Following the same logic, we see that the pretérito perfecto changes to the pluscuamperfecto because it’s formed by a verb in the present and a participle, and we’ve accepted –and understood- that the present changes to the imperfect, and the imperfect plus a participle is the pluscuamperfecto.

The indefinido on the other hand presents two options: it can maintain the same form (with the appropriate changes to the subject pronoun) or it can switch to the pluscuamperfecto. Why? When the indefinido is used to describe an action with a determined limit in the past, the verb can be changed to the pluscuamperfecto, which expresses the same information related to an action that has been completed in a distant past. When the indefinido expresses an action that has occurred in a specific moment in the past however, there is NO other alternative but to use the indefinido itself to express that information.

Keep asking those questions to keep your students engaged on your voyage to the past. You could ask students to make a hypothesis, based on what they’ve seen so far, as to how the rest of the tenses that appear in the estilo directo chart change.

And just one more thing: What about the subjunctive?

We’ll cover more next week.

Hasta pronto.