Direct and indirect speech.

When this is done in some languages, the verb of the quoted sentence is changed to conform in tense to the other verb, i.e., WILL becomes WOULD ; IS becomes WAS, etc. In Tamil, this does not happen. The embedded sentences have verbs with the same tense as they would have if directly quoted, e.g. in English, `Rosa said, ``The weather WILL be nice".' What does change in Tamil is the pronoun, e.g., in the first sentence John is being indirectly quoted. If we were quoting him directly in Tamil, as in English, we would say ÷Ô¨ ¼Ô¨ ÂØÀ¨-ýá ׶ԨÆÔç jaan [ naan varreen]- nnu sonnaaru. `John said, "I will come".' Thus the only difference in Tamil between direct and indirect speech is in the pronoun concord.See Asher 1982 for a further discussion of this.

Thus in Tamil, surface structure is simpler for asking questions or quoting statements about other questions than it is in English. Suppose we have the following situation in English:

• Bob asks, `Did the train come?'
• John, to Harry: `Did Bob ask WHETHER the train HAD come?'

In English, two changes must be made in Bob's question by John. In Tamil the situation is simpler:

• Pillai asks: ×À¿Õ§ Âÿ»Ô«¶Ô? reyil vandaaccaa? `Did the train come?'

• Raja asks Sundaram: ½Õª×Ä ×À¿Õ§ Âÿ»Ô«¶Ôýá Ø´¥¹Ôõ´ÄÔ? pille reyil vandaaccaa-nu keettaankalaa? `Did Pillai ask whether the train had come?'