Tempus studies tense uses, ancient and modern, in great literature and everyday life and in all the major languages of western Europe. The book lays the foundation for the discipline of text linguistics as well as being a masterwork of literary criticism in the tradition of Curtius, Auerbach, and Spitzer.
A foundational book by one of the most distinguished German humanists of the last half century, Tempus joins cultural linguistics and literary interpretation at the hip. Developing two controversial thesesthat sentences are not truly meaningful in isolation from their contexts and that verb tenses are primarily indicators not of time but of the attitude of the speaker or writerTempus surveys a dazzling array of ancient and modern texts from famous authors as well as casual speakers of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and English, with a final chapter extending the observations to Greek, Russian, and world languages.
A classic in German and long available in many other languages, Tempus launched a new discipline, text linguistics, and established a unique career that was marked by precise observation, sensitive cultural outreach, and practical engagement with the situation of migrants. Weinrichs robust and lucid close readings of famous and little-known authors from all the major languages of western Europe expand our literary horizons and challenge our linguistic understanding.
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 DiscussingNarrating 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, Darķo, 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 LanguagesOther 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
Harald Weinrich (19272022), 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 Collčge 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).
