Quote:
Originally Posted by riceball72 
Ok – so all this info form the grammar books supports what I have said to her but she still is not satisfied. She wants to know if it is ok to always put into the past – or when should we keep the present. She seems to want to create her own little rule.
Is one use more common than the other?
Can you recommend when you would use on than the other or is it just a preference thing?
Any help is really appreciated!!!! |
While it is certainly true that acceptance of unshifted tense-forms in nominal subordinates of past tense reporting verbs is increasingly widespread even among educated natives, and that and there may well be some pragmatic value in doing so in terms of conveying additional information about the current situation, my advice to the learner would nevertheless be always to apply tense concord rules, primarily for one very simple, practical reason, to wit that, whereas it will never be deemed incorrect to do so, it may well be deemed incorrect to
fail to do so, and this is something that depends very much on the nature of the reporting verb. For instance, while we may happily 'get away' with saying, or even writing,
[1]
The scientist explained that water turns to steam when heated to 100 degrees.
in place of 'classically' standard (if marginally less natural-sounding)
[1a]
The scientist explained that water turned to steam when heated to 100 degrees.
, the same is not true of structurally analogous
[2] *
I thought you are my friend.
, which cannot be substituted for
[2a]
I thought you were my friend.
and note that its unacceptability is quite unrelated to the presence or otherwise of any intended implication as to the current state of my beliefs, our friendship, or anything else.
In view of this complex case-sensitive 'continuum' of acceptability, running the gamut from [1] (completely acceptable, except perhaps for the most formal academic writing) to [2] (completely unacceptable) - with any number of indeterminate cases falling between these two extremes upon which even natives might disagree! - the learner would clearly be better advised to follow what is, after all, a very clear and eminently learnable transformation rule than to risk producing a non-sentence.
Philo
Re: tenses, indirect speech and Q&A 
Re: tenses, indirect speech and Q&A 
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