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.
Article outline
- 10.1Our findings
- 10.2Issues involved in discourse categorisation
- 10.3Evolving present-tense narrative
- 10.4Future research