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
