Reporting Verbs

Reporting verbs are essential for an advanced level of English. Learn everything you need to know about these verbs in this article. Clear as day!

There are certain grammatical points that all English students resent when they come across them, whatever their level. This is the case with reporting verbs or indirect speech verbs. So pay close attention and buckle down, because this grammatical point is not easy and requires a lot of attention and, above all, a lot of work.

What Reporting Verbs are

Reporting verbs are verbs that we use to communicate people’s ideas, actions, or intentions at a given moment. These verbs, as their name indicates, are indirect speech verbs, exactly like the verbs say, tell or ask, which are so often used in indirect speech (reported speech). However, the peculiarity of most reporting verbs is that they not only communicate a message, but also an intention, feeling, idea, etc.

For example, to illustrate the above statement, let’s see how the following direct speech sentence can be represented in indirect speech in several ways, some better and some worse:

Jack said to Martha, «You stole my wallet!»

We can use simple indirect speech by saying Jack said to Martha that she had stolen his wallet. However, that indirect speech sentence simply adapts the original words to indirect speech, without communicating the intention of the sentence, which is actually an accusation. Therefore, with a reporting verb we could achieve a much better result:

Jack accused Martha of stealing his wallet.

That sentence is much more faithful to the original context than the one that simply reproduces the words textually.

The problem with many of the reporting verbs is that they adopt different structures, some with an object, others without an object, some with prepositions, others without prepositions, etc. Therefore, it is necessary to work with an advanced classification of indirect speech verbs.

How to use Reporting Verbs

The «simplest» way (so to speak) to understand how indirect speech verbs (reporting verbs) work is by classifying them into different categories according to the structure that follows the verb.

Therefore, in this section we are going to group the reporting verbs according to the structure they adopt, but first you should bear the following in mind:

• Some verbs appear in more than one category, such as the verb advise.
• The particle that is always optional in the example sentences.
• The object sb. means somebody.
• The object sth. means something.
• If the object (sb. or sth.) or the preposition comes in brackets, it means that it may or may not appear. If it appears without brackets, it means that the verb requires the object.
• It is much easier to study reporting verbs by knowing which verbs are followed by the infinitive or gerund.
• It is essential to know how to use indirect speech at an intermediate level before starting with advanced reporting verbs.

Let’s now look at the 5 main groups into which English reporting verbs are classified.

1. Reporting verbs followed by “(s.o.) + (preposition) + verb-ing”

In this category we have verbs that are followed by a gerund (verb-ing) and, optionally, an object and/or a preposition.

Let’s look at some examples of sentences with these verbs:

Direct speech: “You should really avoid driving through the city centre,” he said.
Reported speech: He advised me against driving through the city centre.

Direct speech: “Come on, man! We really ought to go the party,” he insisted.
Reported speech: My friend insisted on going to the party.

2. Reporting verbs followed by “to + infinitive”

This category includes reporting verbs that are simply followed by an infinitive.

Some examples of sentences with these indirect speech verbs are:

Direct speech: “Let me give you a hand with those bags,” he said.
Reported speech: He offered to give me a hand with the bags.

Direct speech: “We will not be cutting back on education or healthcare,” the president said.
Reported speech: The president promised not to cut back on education or healthcare.

3. Reporting verbs followed by “sb. + to + infinitive”

In this case, we have verbs followed by an infinitive but also obligatorily with an object:

Below are a couple of examples using these reporting verbs:

Direct speech: “Please, put us up for the weekend, will you?” they asked.
Reported speech: They persuaded me to put them up for the weekend.

Direct speech: “You will do as I say, or else!” he said.
Reported speech: He warned me to do as he said.

4. Reporting verbs followed by “(sb.) (that) + clause”

In this case, we have a long list of verbs that follow this structure. However, it is the easiest, as these verbs follow the regular rules of intermediate level indirect speech. That is, they function the same as the verb say.

Below are some examples of sentences with verbs belonging to this category:

Direct speech: “Oh hell! I’ll have to put up with his nonsense all weekend!” she said.
Reported speech: She complained that she would have to put up with his nonsense all weekend.

Direct speech: “Don´t worry. I will have a word with him, I promise,” my boss said.
Reported speech: My boss promised (me) that he would have a word with him.

5. Reporting verbs followed by “(that) + (past) subjunctive” or “(that) + should”

This last category is the rarest of all, as it includes a series of verbs that are followed by a clause with the verb in the subjunctive mood or with should. The problematic thing is that, as you may already know, in English there is no specific verb form for the subjunctive mood, so we normally use the infinitive or the simple past, as we will see in some examples later.

The verbs recommend and suggest are underlined because they are especially common in this form. Let’s look at a couple of examples precisely with these two verbs:

Direct speech: “We believe it’s a good idea for you to apply for the job again.” my parents told me.
Reported speech: My parents suggested that I should apply for the job again.

The translation of this sentence would be something like «Mis padres me sugirieron que solicitara el trabajo de nuevo.»

Direct speech: “That restaurant is awesome. You should give it a try,” he said.
Reported speech: He recommended that I give/gave that restaurant a try.

The translation of this last sentence would be something like «Me recomendó que probara ese restaurante.»