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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
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.
