Tense changes in indirect speech

[Red5]

Do we always need to backshift the verb in reported speech? Some argues that where the reporting verb is in the past tense, then we should move the other verbs back a tense automatically....

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[guzhao67]

i'm not a teacher. if the original statement is still true at the time you report, you can shift the tense or not. for example: Bill says:"the march starts on 2 June". if you tell your friend before 2 June, you could say:" Bill said the march starts on 2 June", because the statement is still true. otherwise, you need to shift the tense: "Bill said the march started on 2 June"