reported speech + would have to?

Question

What is the correct form of switching from Direct speech to Reported speech in this example: A policeman says "You will have to turn back because the road is closed" Shall it be: 1) A policeman told us we would have to turn back because the road was closed" OR 2) A policeman told us we had to turn back because the road was closed I am just confused with use of 'would have to' and reported speech. EDIT: It is not about "to use backshifting or not", "is the statement still true or not?" Let's say we want to say it in reported speech ... how to handle backshifting correctly here?

Answer 1

Technically correct answer is (1) "A policeman told us we would have to turn back because the road is closed," based on the original sentence. The future tense "will" becomes "would" when reported.

EXAMPLE

Man: The sun will rise tomorrow at 6:30.

The man said the sun would rise tomorrow at 6:30.

I think the difficulty in the sentence is use of "will have to" in the first place. The future tense.

Technically speaking, "You will have to turn back because the road is closed" is not quite correct, because if the road is already closed, then the need to turn back is already a necessity. It won't happen sometime in the future. A more accurate way of communicating this would have been, "You must turn back because the road is closed" or "You have to turn back because the road is closed."

However, in common speech, it is considered courteous to throw in a few extra words and syllables to soften statements of obligation, especially when speaking with a stranger. It might even evolve to sound like: "I hate to inform you, and I do know it's quite a bother, but I'm terribly afraid the road is closed and you will, in fact, have to turn back."

But if you were to put that long-winded polite sentence into reported speech, it would still be correct to summarize it as, "The policeman said that we must turn back because the road is closed."

Remember, reported speech is a summary of someone's speech. It is used when the underlying message is important, not the exact words that were used. When learning the mechanics of translating direct into reported speech, it good to follow the grammatical rules exactly, so you understand how the verbs are transformed between the two forms. However, in actual usage, as long as you are restating the information accurately, the specific words you pick are not as important. This is an important differentiation between direct quotations, which -must- be the exact words of the speaker, and indirect, reported speech.