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  1. I will do it when you help me

  2. I'm going to do it when you help me

  3. I drive when she sleeps

Let's say I want to report these sentences. If they are still true or yet to happen I leave them unchanged for instance "He said Greg will do it when she helps him". On the other hand when those statements are no longer true we report them for instance "He said Greg was going to do it when she helped him". This part is completely clear to me.

What bothers me is that I saw one more variation "He said Greg would do it when she helps him". If it is correct, can I do the same with other 2 sentences and write "He said Greg was going to do it when she helps him"/"He said Greg drove when she sleeps"? Do they have the same meaning?

Ps. There is no intended meaning. I once saw that this sentence "I will do it when she arrives" was reported like this "He said he would do it when she arrives". I don't understand why only part of the sentence was back shifted. If it is correct can I do the same with other sentences, I mean that I back shift only one part of a sentence?

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    I drive when she sleeps is an unlikely utterance, because it implies her sleeping is what motivates me to drive - as in I go to the beach when it's sunny. What you probably mean is better expressed by I drive while she sleeps. But as with your previous questions, you haven't told us exactly what you're trying to say. Please describe the full context and intended meaning of your examples.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 3 at 11:55
  • +1 for @FumbleFingers. Your questions cannot even have answers because they require more context. What meaning do you wish to express?
    – Paul Tanenbaum
    Commented Aug 3 at 15:09
  • Google Books reports No results found for "I'll do it when you help", but there are dozens of matches for "I'll do it if you help", which is probably what you're trying to say there.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 3 at 15:27
  • The direct versions are completely and utterly disconnected from the alleged 'reported' ones. Who are 'I', 'he, 'Greg', 'you', 'she', etc?
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Aug 3 at 15:55

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If you want to be completely technically correct, then the answer is no - the tenses are not entirely consistent in the statement in question. As you have already figured out, the present tense "when she helps him" doesn't align with the past tense in the first part of the sentence. In reported speech, if the reporting verb is in the past tense (eg "he said"), the following verbs usually shift to past tense as well. Yet this is something that only becomes an issue when put under scrutiny. If a fellow native English speaker said this to me, I probably wouldn't even notice. I might not even pick up on it if I were reading. But when it is in a resource that is for learning English it is fair to scrutinise it. The grammar of extemporaneous speech cannot be subject to the same degree of scrutiny as the written word because we don't always know exactly how we will end a sentence when we begin it.

As has already been pointed out, there are other inconsistencies in the statements. "I drive when she sleeps" is more likely to be either "I drive while she sleeps", if speaking in general, or "I will drive when she sleeps". So perhaps the resource you are using is not completely trustworthy.

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