One infinitive, two reporting times

Two original practice sentences are compared: „Marcus dicit puellam venire“ and „Marcus dixit puellam venire.“ They are not offered as quotations from a prescribed author. The group is asked to explain why the same present infinitive can receive different natural modern-language tense wording. One learner treats venire as a finite present verb and makes puellam its direct object. Another decides that dixit requires the girl’s arrival to have happened before Marcus spoke. A third translates both sentences identically and deletes the reporting-time difference. The task asks for grammatical roles and relative time, not a prediction about whether the girl eventually arrived. No additional sentence establishes her identity, route, motive or actual location. A correct explanation must therefore separate the reported content from a claim about events independently verified by the narrator.