Reiko Ikeo, Eri Shigematsu and Masayuki Nakao
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 43] 2024
► pp. 245–256
Present-tense narrative has often been discussed as a technique that construes a narrative sphere different from that created by past-tense narrative. Such discussions have tended to focus on the relationship between the narrating and narrated time, or whether the narrative tense is used as a deictic or a-deictic marker of time in narrative, as the title of Casparis’ seminal work Tense without Time (1975) shows. Acknowledging the diverse nature of the use of the narrative present tense, many studies take theoretical and conceptual approaches to analysing particular titles of contemporary present-tense narrative by encapsulating the developments of the stories. We have taken a different approach to contemporary present-tense narrative. Being aware of the narratological significance of the use of the present tense for story-telling and its historical background, we have chosen to take a bottom-up approach to investigate the stylistic effects and the narratological ramifications of contemporary present-tense narrative, comparing them with those of 20th-century past-tense narrative. For this purpose, we created two corpora, PREST and PAST. We have examined both the linguistic structures and discourse presentation in the two types of narrative by deploying two annotation schemes: annotating the texts of each corpus with (a) part of speech tags and (b) discourse presentation tags. These two annotation systems enabled us to analyse each corpus in terms of both their grammatical, lexical configurations and discourse presentation categories. As our two corpora differ not only in the narrative tense used but also in the time frames of publication years, the stylistic differences and noticeable contrasts in discourse presentation in the two corpora summarised below are attributable either to the use of the narrative tense or diachronic changes in written English or both.