backshift

English

Etymology

back +‎ shift

Noun

Examples

The sentence:

Fred says "I play football".

becomes the sentence:

Fred said that he played football.

backshift (countable and uncountable, plural backshifts)

(grammar) The changing of the tense of a verb from present to past in reported speech.
(statistics) A function on a stochastic process whose value on any random variable is the preceding random variable in the process.

Verb

backshift (third-person singular simple present backshifts, present participle backshifting, simple past and past participle backshifted)

(grammar, transitive) To change the tense of a verb from present to past in reported speech.