1081: Reported Speech Overview Nov 24, 2017

There are a lot of ways to report speech, but not all of them are treated the same way, both socially and grammatically. A traditional way to do this is “[person] said/ordered/mentioned/stated/posited (that)...” which reports, obviously, what was communicated verbally. There are plenty of verbs other than “said” such as the ones before, but these all use the same syntactic structures, and while they all communicate the same thing more or less, certainly some of them would sound clunky outside of written work. Other phrases such as “[person] was like” sounds less formal generally—one wouldn’t find it in a newspaper or academic journal—and (at least for the second half of that statement) there is good reason. “[person] was like” allows the person reporting the communication to include non-verbal cues, and it is certainly possible to simple utter the phrase and make a face, or gasp etc, which wouldn’t serve written work much, but does allow for people to include much more information about past conversations. In some dialects, like MLE (spoken in London), the phrase “this is [me/them]” is used the same way as “[person] was like”.