Read more
Informationen zum Autor By Suzanne Fleischman Klappentext In this pathfinding study, Suzanne Fleischman brings together theory and methodology from various quarters to shed important new light on the linguistic structure of narrative, a primary and universal device for translating our experiences into language.Fleischman sees linguistics as laying the foundation for all narratological study, since it offers insight into how narratives are constructed in their most primary context: everyday speech. She uses a linguistic model designed for "natural" narrative to explicate the organizational structure of "artificial" narrative texts, primarily from the Middle Ages and the postmodern period, whose seemingly idiosyncratic use of tenses has long perplexed those who study them. Fleischman develops a functional theory of tense and aspect in narrative that accounts for the wide variety of functions-pragmatic as well as grammatical-that these two categories of grammar are called upon to perform in the linguistic economy of a narration. Zusammenfassung Brings together the theory and methodology from various quarters on the linguistic structure of narrative, a primary and universal device for translating our experiences into language. This title develops a functional theory of tense and aspect in narrative that accounts for the variety of functions - pragmatic as well as grammatical. Inhaltsverzeichnis AbbreviationsPrefaceIntroductionChapter 1. Working Definitions and Operational Preliminaries 1.1. Tense1.2. Aspect1.3. Situation types1.4. Grammar, discourse, and the meaning of tense-aspect categories1.5. Tenses of the past system1.6. Tenses of the present system1.7. Tense-aspect in early RomanceChapter 2. A Theory of Tense-Aspect in Narrative Based on Markedness 2.1. The concept of markedness2.2. Markedness and tense-aspect categories in narrativeChapter 3. “Ungrammatical” Tenses: Background of the Question 3.1. Scope of the phenomenon3.2. Diegetic and mimetic discourse3.3. Grammatical “freedom” of the early vernaculars3.4. Tense alternation as a mark of “literary” écritures3.5. Prosodic considerations3.6. Aspectual hypotheses and “situation types”3.7. The HISTORICAL PRESENT: The “past-more-vivid”3.8. The NARRATIVE PRESENT, HISTORICAL PRESENT, and PRESENT tense3.9. Participant tracking3.10. From oral performance to écriture: Oral residue in written texts3.11. Performed stories: Medieval and modern, natural and artificialChapter 4. Narrative Discourse: Typological Considerations 4.1. Verbal representations of experience: Story structure and reality structure4.2. Differentia specifica of narrative textuality4.3. Stories, narratives, and other verbalizations of experience4.4. Narrative fiction4.5. Modes of discourse: “Storytelling” and “communication”4.6. Linguistic marks of storytelling4.7. Tense and aspect as metalinguistic signals of narrative genresChapter 5. The Linguistic Structure of Narrative Part I. Temporal Structure 5.1. Speaker-now and story-now5.2. Retrospective discourse and prospective time5.3. Iconic sequence and the narrative normPart II. Text Structure 5.4. The global structure of narrative5.5. Evaluation5.6. Adapting the natural narrative model to complex narrations5.7. The clausal structure of narrative5.8. ConclusionChapter 6. Textual Functions Part I. Grounding: The “Texture” of the Text 6.1. The foreground-background contrast6.2. Toward a theory of grounding6.3. Grounding and parataxis6.4. Tense-aspect and grounding6.5. Creating cohesion: The chansons de gestePart II. Boundary Marking: The “Space” of the Text 6.6. Tense switching and the segmentation of narrative textsPart III. Information Blocking: The “Tempo” of the Text 6.7. “Co-subordinate” nexus6.8. Pacing the discourseChapter 7. Expressive Functions 7.1. Point of view and focalization7.2. The Speaker and the experiencer7.3. Free indirect discourse7.4. Interior monologue7.5. Tense, temporality, and focalization7.6. Time, t...
