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to taskDirect Speech (DS). Here the words of the character are entirely unfiltered by the narrator. The sentence only consists of a reported clause, there are no quotation marks and no reporting clause. The lexical items belong to the character, and the deictic markers (1st- and 2nd-person pronouns, present tense a d the 'close' deixis of the place adverb 'here' and the time adverb 'yesterday') are all appropriate to the character in the reported discourse situation, not the narrator. She contradicts (speech act) his assumption that she was in the same place the day before (propositional content) and we also know the words and structures she used to say that propositional content, including her abusive address form for him.
Direct Speech (DS). This sentence is exactly the same as for 1 (and so our comments for one also apply here), except that it is surrounded by quotation marks. These quotation marks constitute minimal evidence of the presence of the narrator, and so we have a blend of character and narrator, with the character's contribution very much dominant.
Direct Speech (DS). This is the 'prototypical' kind of example example of DS usually found in grammar books. The lexis, grammar and deixis of the reported clause is all appropriate to the character (as in 1 and 2), but the quotation marks and the reporting clause ('she said') are narrator-related. So the prototypical version of DS is actually a blend of character and narrator contributions, with all of the reporting clause attributable to the character.
Free Indirect Speech (FIS). This sentence is in a kind of 'half-way house' in between Direct Speech and Indirect Speech. The 3rd-person pronoun, past tense and remote deictic adverb 'there' turn up in the IS version (6). And the 3rd-person reference for 'the idiot', is appropriate for IS, rather than DS (where we get 'you idiot'. But there is no 'reporting clause + reported clause' structure typical of IS, and the near deictic adverb 'yesterday' and the exclamatory vocative noun phrase (and the exclamation mark) at the end of the sentence are appropriate to DS. It is this mix of DS and IS features which is typical of FIS, and any such mix will do to produce the FIS effect. As a consequence, we know what was said, but it is difficult to know whether the words used to say it belong to the character or the narrator. This kind of ambiguity is often very helpful for novelists in manipulating viewpoint relations.
Note that another way in which this sentence is potentially ambiguous is whether or not it is 'doing' speech presentation at all. We are assuming it is a representation of what 'she' said because we are relating it to the other speech presentations on our scale. But in some contexts, it could be seen not as a representation of what 'she' said at all, but as a comment by the narrator on the fact that 'she' wasn't 'there'. This kind of ambiguity (is it a representation of what someone said or a narrator comment about the fictional world and the characters?) can also be used tactically by novelists.
Free Indirect Speech (FIS). This sentence is the same as 4, except that 'the idiot' is removed. So all of the comments about 4 also apply here. But this version is a slightly more indirect version of the FIS than 4 (one less direct feature occurs). Note, then, that the Free Indirect speech presentation category can have a range of variation within it, just as DS does (see examples 1-3).
Indirect Speech (IS). Like 7, we know the speech act force of her utterance (statement), but we also know the propositional form of what she said. This is because we have a 2-clause structure, with the reported clause ('that she had not been there the day before' subordinated grammatically to the reporting clause 'She told him'). However, if we compare this sentence with 1, 2 and 3, we can see that the vocabulary and deictic items are all appropriate to the narrator, not the character. There is no 'you idiot' address term, for example, and the 3rd-person pronouns, past tense and the 'remote deixis' adverbials are all appropriate to the narrator, not the character. So we feel closer to the speech thgan 7, because we know more than in 7 - we know the propositional content. But we not as 'close-up' as we are with the DS of 1-3 because we do not have access to the words and structures the character used to say what she said (utter the propositional content).
Narrator's Representation of Speech Act (NRSA). As with 8, there is only one clause involved (i.e. no reporting clause). But we know the speech act force of what she said from the verb phrase 'pointed out', and something of its topic from the noun phrase acting as its object, 'his error'. Compared with 8, we know that she contradicted his assumption, even though we don't know what his assumption was.
Narrator's Representation of Voice (NRV). There is no reported clause and no indication of the speech act used by the character, let alone the propositional content of what was said or the words and structures used to say it. The representation of the character speech is so minimal that nothing can be determined about what was said apart from the manner adverb 'severely'. So this is the manner of speech presentation which positions us in our most distanced aspect from the character - it is as if you are so far away from the character that all you can hear is the tone of voice.
No speech presentation involved at all here. The narrator just tells us what happens in the fictional world of the story and so everything we are told comes straightforwardly from the narrator.