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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• Translators' Note ixIntroduction 1Jane K. Brown and Marshall Brown1 Tense in Texts 9Tense 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, 252 Discussing–Narrating 32Syntax and Communication, 32 • Register, 36 • Tense in DifferentGenres, 42 • The World of Discussion, 45 • The World of Narrating, 50 • Tense in the Language of Children, 553 Perspective 60Time in Texts, 60 • The Future (using French as an example), 64 • The Perfekt in German, 69 • The Perfect in English, 75 • ThorntonWilder: The Ides of March, 78 • The Passé composé in French, 83 •The Passato prossimo in Italian, 87 • The Perfecto compuesto inSpanish, 91 • Narration, Past, Truth, 964 Highlighting 101Narrative Highlighting, 101 • Narrative Tempo in the Novel, 106 • Baudelaire: "Le vieux saltimbanque" (The Old Mountebank), 111 • Of the Tense of Death, 1175 Tense in Novellas and Short Stories: Highlighting vs. Aspect 121Maupassant, 121 • Pirandello, 126 • Unamuno, Darío, Echegaray, 129 •Hemingway, 135 • Frame Narrative (Boccaccio), 142 • Narration in theMiddle Ages, 147 • Frame and Highlighting in Modern Stories, 1506 Tense Transitions 153Tense in Dialogue, 153 •Descartes, Rousseau, and the Sequence of Tenses, 1647 Tense Metaphors 171Tense Metaphors in Texts, 171 • Condition and Consequence, Reality and Unreality, 1808 Tense Combinations 186Tense and Person, 186 • Tense and Adverbs, 190 • CombinedTransitions, 197 • Semi-finite Verbs, 2059 A Crisis in Narration? 211Tense in Old French, 211 • Evidence of Language Consciousness in FrenchClassicism, 217 • The Time of Newspapers, 224 • Albert Camus: L'étranger,227 • Oral Narration in French, 236 • A Parallel: Tense in South-GermanDialects, 24410 Other Languages—Other Tenses? 252Tense in Ancient Greek, 252 • Tense in Latin, 256 • Whorf, Spengler,and the Hopi Indians, 264 • Toward a New Method of Description, 270Index 275