Media and information — French B1/B2

Reported speech and the sequence of tenses

Le discours indirect et la concordance des temps

Start with the good news, because it is bigger than the bad news: English already does this. "He says he is ill" becomes "He said he was ill"; "I'll call you" becomes "He said he would call me". French backshifts for exactly the same reason and in exactly the same places, so you are not learning a new concept — only new forms. What English does that French forbids is dropping the conjunction: we say "He said he had checked", but French can never omit que, and it must repeat it before every reported clause — Il a dit qu'il était en retard et QU'il publierait le papier le soir même. Leaving out that second qu' is the most common anglophone slip in this whole area.

The machinery is three pairs, and each maps onto something you already say in English: présent → imparfait ("is" → "was"), passé composé → plus-que-parfait ("has checked / checked" → "had checked"), futur simple → conditionnel présent ("will" → "would"); and, one step further, futur antérieur → conditionnel passé ("will have finished" → "would have finished"). The conditionnel here carries no hypothetical meaning at all — it is simply the future seen from a point in the past, which is precisely the job English gives to "would". Equally important is what does not move: imparfait, plus-que-parfait, conditionnel and subjonctif stay put, because they have nowhere further back to go. And if the reporting verb is in the present (Il dit que…, Elle affirme que…), nothing shifts — again as in English.

Questions are where French stops resembling English. A yes/no question is introduced by SI, never by que and never with est-ce que: « Tu as recoupé l'info ? » → Il m'a demandé SI j'avais recoupé l'info. Conveniently, English "if/whether" behaves the same way, but remember that this si means "whether", not conditional "if". French has no do-support either, so the "did" of "He asked me if I did check" has no equivalent to translate. The real trap is "what", which English uses for both subject and object while French splits it in two: « Qu'est-ce qui… ? » → CE QUI (subject: Il voulait savoir ce qui s'était passé), « Qu'est-ce que… ? » → CE QUE (object: Elle a demandé ce que j'en pensais). All the other question words — qui, quand, où, pourquoi, comment, combien, quel — stay as they are; you simply drop est-ce que and the inversion.

Orders behave the way you would expect: the imperative becomes DE + infinitive, matching English "he told me to check my sources". In the negative, both halves of ne pas sit together in front of the infinitive: « Ne publie pas ! » → Il m'a dit DE NE PAS publier. Then reset the coordinates of the utterance, exactly as you do in English. Pronouns and possessives move (« J'ai perdu mes notes » → Il a dit qu'IL avait perdu SES notes — and note that ses says nothing about the owner's gender, only about the thing owned), and so do time and place markers: aujourd'hui → ce jour-là, hier → la veille, avant-hier → l'avant-veille, demain → le lendemain, après-demain → le surlendemain, maintenant → à ce moment-là / alors, il y a deux jours → deux jours plus tôt (auparavant), la semaine prochaine → la semaine suivante, la semaine dernière → la semaine précédente, ici → là.

Now the vocabulary, where anglophones lose the most marks. French journalism runs on reporting verbs that carry a judgement — affirmer, assurer, préciser, ajouter, souligner, rappeler, nier, démentir, avouer, reconnaître, reprocher, s'étonner — and several of them are false friends. Prétendre means "to claim", with a strong hint that the claim is unfounded; "to pretend" is faire semblant. Prévenir and avertir mean "to warn", never "to prevent" (that is empêcher). Démentir is to issue an official denial and has nothing to do with dementia. Assister à means "to attend", not "to assist"; a stagiaire attends the briefing, she does not help with it. Watch the countability too: French une information is one item of news and des informations are news items, where English "information" cannot be counted at all. Finally, some of these verbs take an infinitive rather than que: Il a nié AVOIR lancé la rumeur ; Elle a reconnu S'ÊTRE trompée — where that final -e is a past participle agreeing with a female speaker, an agreement English has no way of hearing, so you have to build the habit deliberately.

Two last points. The subjonctif inside reported speech simply stays in the present (Il a dit qu'il doutait que ce SOIT vrai): modern spoken and journalistic French no longer uses the imparfait du subjonctif, so there is nothing extra to learn — and since English has almost no living subjunctive left, do not go looking for an English form to copy; just remember that douter que, il faut que and their relatives keep their subjonctif untouched by the backshift. And when the reported fact is still true or is a general truth, contemporary French allows you to skip the shift altogether — Il a dit que la Terre TOURNE autour du Soleil is perfectly normal, exactly as English allows "He said the Earth goes round the Sun". In a news piece or an exam, though, apply the full concordance consistently: it is never wrong, and inconsistency is.