two verbs
 

Hello,

I've got a question about these two verbs:"to tell" and

"to say". I know the difference in which we say " to

tell him" but " to say to him". But actually I don't

know the real difference in nature of these verbs. In

reality, when do we can use "to tell" and when do we can

use "to say"? Dosn't it matter if we use them in every

situation interchangably?

I'll be so glad if you inform me about this matter.:)

kind regards,

Re: two verbs
 

I think they are completely interchangeable, but I'm not an expert

Re: two verbs
 

I'm not really sure what you're asking, so apologies if I'm saying things you already know, but basically there are three differences between these verbs a) use in direct and reported speech b) syntactic patterns and b) collocational relationships :

a) Direct/Reported speech

Say can be used in both - She said "I can't do it" or She said that she couldn't do it.
However, tell can only be used for reported speech : She told me that she couldn't do it

b) Syntactic patterns

As you indicated, the verbs are used with different syntactic patterns :
- tell somebody something : She told me that she couldn't do it
- say something : She said she couldn't do it
There is the "to" option, but this is rare - I checked in a Concordancer and in the first 40 examples of said, it didn't occur at all. If we want to specify the person, then the natural choice is to use tell.


So, in all the examples so far, say and tell are interchangeable unless we specifically want to specify who was being spoken to - in which tell would be the natural choice - in other words we'd be more likely to say : I didn't tell John, but I told Mary than I didn't say it to John but I said it to Mary - the latter is grammatically correct but sounds a bit unnatural.

c) Collocational Relationships

Where these two do differ is in their use in set phrases. In the following phrases they are not interchangeable :

say a prayer /your prayers
say the alphabet
tell a story
tell the time
tell a lie / the truth

and various other set expressions which you can find in a dictionary if you want to.
tell fortunes

Re: two verbs
 

In American English, "tell" is typically used with a person who is an object:
Tell me about your last vacation.
I told John about your new car.