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Grammar in Action: Building comprehensive grammars of talk-in-interaction
Edited by Jakob Steensig, Maria Jørgensen, Jan K. Lindström, Nicholas Mikkelsen, Karita Suomalainen and Søren Sandager Sørensen
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 37] 2025
► pp. 228–265

Chapter 8
The use of past tense formats in German talk-in-interaction

 | Université de Neuchâtel
The present chapter investigates three frequent German verbs, finden ‘to find’, glauben ‘to believe’, and meinen ‘to mean’ in first and third person preterite and present perfect. Prior research on past tense distribution primarily identifies regional variation as a driving force (Fischer 2018) or treats preterite and present perfect as ‘interchangeable’ (Helbig & Buscha 2001). I test these assumptions by investigating a large corpus of German talk-in-interaction. My findings show that speakers use lexico-syntactic constructions consisting of past tense formats and specific grammatical components to implement distinct actions. Identifying these paste tense constructions, I demonstrate that tense is not only a ‘traditional’ grammatical category but also crucial for implementing social actions, thus constituting an indispensable part of a grammar for talk-in-interaction.
Keywords: past tense, social action format, preterite, present perfect, German, cognitive verbs, variation, assessments, reported speech
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Past tense in German
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.An interactional approach to past tense
  • 5.Past tense formats in German: Constructions with preterite and present perfect to implement social actions
    • 5.1Finden ‘to find’
    • 5.2Meinen ‘to mean’
    • 5.3Glauben ‘to believe’
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
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