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Tempus: The World of Discussion and the World of Narration

Online ISBN:
9781531504243
Print ISBN:
9781531503338
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Tempus: The World of Discussion and the World of Narration

Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
6 February 2024
Online ISBN:
9781531504243
Print ISBN:
9781531503338
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Tempus argues that tenses have been widely misunderstood by language users, linguists, and literary critics alike. They must be considered not in themselves, but as any given sentence interacts with surrounding statements, in an approach that the book names text linguistics. The principal impact of tense selection is not to indicate time but to focus the stance of the writer or speaker. Western European languages then typically have two groups of tenses, narrative tenses that report information, whether fictional or real, and discussion tenses that communicate attitudes and positions. Within these groups tenses distinguish the relationships of the different pieces of information in the text to one another in terms of ordering and in terms of relative importance. Tempus explores its initial insight through consideration of varying tense patterns as aspects of style in the Romance languages, German, English, and Latin, with close readings of short stories, novels, and poems from antiquity to modern times as well as of colloquial speech and child language, and with particular attention to combinations of different tenses, of tenses with pronouns and adverbs, and other special uses. It also considers the history of tense usage, particularly the shifting relation of simple past and present perfect in French and the disappearance of the simple past in South German dialects, and it concludes with observations about tense usage in Greek, Latin, and world languages.

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