reported speech

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peter123

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Sep 13, 2007
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Hi there,
Is the following reported time reference correct?

Paul said, 'I am going to leave here tomorrow.'
Paul said that he was going to leave the day after.

tks
pete
 

kfredson

Senior Member
Joined
Dec 13, 2009
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Academic
Hi there,
Is the following reported time reference correct?

Paul said, 'I am going to leave here tomorrow.'
Paul said that he was going to leave the day after.

tks
pete

Yes, he is going to leave the day after the current day, that is, tomorrow. I hope I have understood what it is that you mean here.
 

sarat_106

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Mar 19, 2008
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Oriya
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India
Hi there,
Is the following reported time reference correct?

Paul said, 'I am going to leave here tomorrow.'
Paul said that he was going to leave the day after.

tks
pete

I think ‘here’ is a misconstrued word in the direct speech. The underlined expression being a future form of ‘will’ followed by ‘leave’ a transitive verb, the word following it should be the object. In that case ‘here’ can not be an adverb when there is already an adverbial time expression ‘tomorrow. So either ‘here’ can be replaced by a noun or prepositional phrase such as ‘at 6 o’clock’ or treated as a noun to mean “this place’. So rightly the adverbial time expression can be changed to the day after or the next day. You can say:

Paul said that he was going to/would leave this place/at 6 o’clock the day after/the next day.
 

philo2009

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Jan 16, 2009
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British English
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Hi there,
Is the following reported time reference correct?

Paul said, 'I am going to leave here tomorrow.'
Paul said that he was going to leave the day after.

tks
pete

Not necessarily: although English has rules of tense concord (requiring here 'was' rather than 'is', at least for formal/careful usage), there are no corresponding rules of "adverbial concord". If the day in question can still, at the time of reporting, be called 'tomorrow', then the word can remain unaffected. We would reserve such relative terms as 'the day after' (or, better still 'the next/following day') for cases where the original utterance took place further back in the past.

The same applies to any adverbials of place: it would be quite ridiculous for a speaker to refer, for almost any reason, to his/her current location as 'there'!
 
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