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 theses—that 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 writer—Tempus 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. Weinrich’s 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.
Table of Content
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 Discussing–Narrating | 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, Darío, 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 Languages—Other 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
About the author
Harald Weinrich (1927–2022), 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 Collège 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).
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