Tempus

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).

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