Abstract
Speakers embody their subjective views of past events in the reporting styles that they use in narratives. They indicate their evaluations of reported-speaker attitudes both within and outside of reported dialogues (i.e., subordinate clauses that are quoted dialogues) in the ways that they adjust direct quotations. In conversational English narratives, the speakers often switch the tense of the reporting verb to mark the reported speaker's attitudinal stance, such as (1) a conclusive versus a searching attitude, (2) a conflicting versus a conflict-avoiding attitude, and (3) a 'strong' versus a 'weak' attitude. The reporting-verb tense correlates with dialogue-internal features such as discourse markers, repetitions, tag questions, and repairs. This article proposes a discourse-oriented view of reporting-verb tense switching by addressing the tense function, subjectivity, and the purpose of telling personal narratives.
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