Tempus - The World of Discussion and the World of Narration

"Harald Weinrich's classic book, long overdue for English translation, offers a groundbreaking study of time and tense. Arguing that tenses indicate not time in itself but the speaker's relation to the utterance, Weinrich distinguishes narrative tenses from tenses of speech or commentary and explores the different ways in which they function in various European languages and works of literature."--Jonathan Culler, author of Theory of the Lyric

A foundational book by one of the most distinguished German humanists of the last half century, Tempus joins cultural linguistics and literary interpretation at the hip. Developing two controversial theses--that sentences are not truly meaningful in isolation from their contexts and that verb tenses are primarily indicators not of time but of the attitude of the speaker or writer--Tempus surveys a dazzling array of ancient and modern texts from famous authors as well as casual speakers of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and English, with a final chapter extending the observations to Greek, Russian, and world languages.

A classic in German and long available in many other languages, Tempus launched a new discipline, text linguistics, and established a unique career that was marked by precise observation, sensitive cultural outreach, and practical engagement with the situation of migrants. Weinrich's robust and lucid close readings of famous and little-known authors from all the major languages of western Europe expand our literary horizons and challenge our linguistic understanding.

Harald Weinrich (1927-2022) was Professor of German as a Foreign Language at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, and held the Chair of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Collège de France. He is the author of On Borrowed Time: The Art and Economy of Living with Deadlines (2009), The Linguistics of Lying, and Other Essays (2005), and Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (2004).

Jane Brown and Marshall Brown are retired professors of comparative literature at the University of Washington.

List of contents

Translators' Note | ix

Introduction | 1

Jane K. Brown and Marshall Brown

1 Tense in Texts | 9

Tense and Time, 9 ¿ Text Linguistics, 11 ¿ A Preliminary Reflection:

Obstinate Signs, 14 ¿ Tense Distribution, 17 ¿ Two Tense Groups:

Discussing and Narrating, 22 ¿ On the Freedom of the Narrator, 25

2 Discussing-Narrating | 32

Syntax and Communication, 32 ¿ Register, 36 ¿ Tense in Different

Genres, 42 ¿ The World of Discussion, 45 ¿ The World of Narrating, 50 ¿

Tense in the Language of Children, 55

3 Perspective | 60

Time in Texts, 60 ¿ The Future (using French as an example), 64 ¿

The Perfekt in German, 69 ¿ The Perfect in English, 75 ¿ Thornton

Wilder: The Ides of March, 78 ¿ The Passé composé in French, 83 ¿

The Passato prossimo in Italian, 87 ¿ The Perfecto compuesto in

Spanish, 91 ¿ Narration, Past, Truth, 96

4 Highlighting | 101

Narrative Highlighting, 101 ¿ Narrative Tempo in the Novel, 106 ¿

Baudelaire: "Le vieux saltimbanque" (The Old Mountebank), 111 ¿

Of the Tense of Death, 117

5 Tense in Novellas and Short Stories: Highlighting vs. Aspect | 121

Maupassant, 121 ¿ Pirandello, 126 ¿ Unamuno, Darío, Echegaray, 129 ¿

Hemingway, 135 ¿ Frame Narrative (Boccaccio), 142 ¿ Narration in the

Middle Ages, 147 ¿ Frame and Highlighting in Modern Stories, 150

6 Tense Transitions 153

Tense in Dialogue, 153 ¿

Descartes, Rousseau, and the Sequence of Tenses, 164

7 Tense Metaphors | 171

Tense Metaphors in Texts, 171 ¿ Condition and Consequence,

Reality and Unreality, 180

8 Tense Combinations | 186

Tense and Person, 186 ¿ Tense and Adverbs, 190 ¿ Combined

Transitions, 197 ¿ Semi-finite Verbs, 205

9 A Crisis in Narration? | 211

Tense in Old French, 211 ¿ Evidence of Language Consciousness in French

Classicism, 217 ¿ The Time of Newspapers, 224 ¿ Albert Camus: L'étranger,

227 ¿ Oral Narration in French, 236 ¿ A Parallel: Tense in South-German

Dialects, 244

10 Other Languages-Other Tenses? | 252

Tense in Ancient Greek, 252 ¿ Tense in Latin, 256 ¿ Whorf, Spengler,

and the Hopi Indians, 264 ¿ Toward a New Method of Description, 270

Index | 275

About the author

Harald Weinrich (1927-2022), after holding professorships in Romance philology and in linguistics at several universities, was founding chair of the Department of German as a Foreign Language at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and, following his retirement in 1992, for six years held the Chair of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Collège de France. Among his many books on literature, linguistics, French and German grammar, language pedagogy, and the sociology of cultures, three have previously been translated into English: The Linguistics of Lying and Other Essays (Washington, 2012), On Borrowed Time: The Art and Economy of Living with Deadlines (Chicago, 2008), and Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (Cornell, 2004).

Summary

Tempus studies tense uses, ancient and modern, in great literature and everyday life and in all the major languages of western Europe. The book lays the foundation for the discipline of text linguistics as well as being a masterwork of literary criticism in the tradition of Curtius, Auerbach, and Spitzer.

Product details

• Authors: Harald Weinrich, Herald Weinrich
• Assisted by: Jane K Brown (Translation), Jane K. Brown (Translation), Marshall Brown (Translation)
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.02.2024
• EAN: 9781531503345
• ISBN: 978-1-5315-0334-5
• No. of pages: 277
• Series: Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies