Beyond Time - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

without affecting its temporal structure:
(9) Clause types in Labov & Waletzky (1967)
a. Narrative clauses: cannot be displaced without affecting temporal structure
b. Restricted clauses: can be displaced through part of the narrative
c. Free clauses: can be placed anywhere throughout the narrative
Once all clauses are assigned to one of these categories, the narrative’s underlying sequence
can be determined by moving all clauses to the beginning of their displacement sets.
The method for narrative analysis outlined in Labov & Waletzky (1967) was used by those
authors to describe “oral versions of personal experience”, which they argue are the most
straightforward to analyze. However, their methodology has been successfully implemented
in other types of narrative, perhaps most notably by Fleischman (1990) in her analysis of
tense and aspect as narrative devices in a variety of languages and genres from a wide time
span. My analysis method, outlined in 1.4 below, also largely follows Labov & Waletzky
(1967) and Labov’s subsequent work on narrative. Tools from the framework of Longacre
(1996), particularly those related to peak marking, are also employed.
1.2.5.3 Tense and aspect in narrative
Regardless of the controversy over “basic” functions of TA forms vis-à-vis their narrative/discourse
roles (1.2.3), it is apparent from research on a number of languages that
both tense and aspect are used to fulfill a variety of goals in narrative discourse. Fleischman
(1990) frames these uses in terms of markedness: when a tense or aspect occurs that is
marked for a particular quality or qualities within narrative, it is likely there to perform a
function related to those qualities.
As noted above, in Old French texts, the Simple Past and Narrative Present may alternate
within a narrative, without an immediately apparent distinction. Both are used
to describe “temporally ordered, punctual, past events in the narrative foreground” (Fleischman
1985:870) However, closer investigation shows that when a Simple Past interrupts a
series of sentences given in Narrative Present, there is also an interruption of the temporally
sequential narrative flow to give or repeat background information (Fleischman 1985).
Fleischman goes on to examine the Preterit (=past perfective) in terms of its markedness
for various referential, textual, expressive, and metalinguistic functions, as in table 1.5.
Crucial here are markedness for reality status at the expressive level, and grounding at
the textual level. Because the past perfective is in many languages “the expected (unmarked)
tense for reporting events”, it is not used to foreground events in narrative (–foreground),
and narrated events described in the past perfective are taken as realis (within the narrative
world), although in non-narrative contexts, past tenses are often used to indicate distance
and non-reality (Fleischman 1990:57). 23
23 Note that Fleischman (1990:ch. 6) takes a different view from that of e.g. Hopper (1979a), who defines
foregrounded parts of a narrative as those that give the main story line, in contrast to the (backgrounded)
parts that give background information or otherwise comment on the story line. For Fleischman, foreground-
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