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.