TENSE TUESDAY: CHANGING 'CAN' TO 'COULD' IN REPORTED SPEECH

Welcome back to The Daily Vitamin, everyone! Are you ready for today's lesson? Today we are looking at REPORTED SPEECH. Specifically, we are looking at when to change CAN to COULD in reported speech.

Remember that REPORTED SPEECH is when we report what was said, directly, in another conversation. 

Example 1 (Direct Speech): I don't like that film. 

Example 2 (Indirect Speech): He said he didn't like that film. 

For REPORTED SPEECH, we change the verb to its past tense version. In the examples above, DON'T is changed to DIDN'T. 

When we have the modal CAN in Direct Speech, we change it to COULD in reported speech.

Example 3 (Direct Speech): I can drive you to the store. 

Example 4 (Indirect Speech): He said he could drive me to the store. 

Example 5 (Direct Speech): I can't hear you on this phone. 

Example 6 (Indirect Speech): He said he couldn't hear me on this phone. 

For more on Reported Speech, click on the following link to read a Daily Vitamin post from 2006.

https://www.ziggurat.es/es/lecciones_ingles/index.asp?id=534

That's all for today. I hope that you have a great day! Thank you for reading.