Suzanne Fleischman - Böcker

In this pathfinding study, Suzanne Fleischman brings together theory and methodology from various quarters to shed important new light on the linguistic structure of narrative, a primary and universal device for translating our experiences into language.Fleischman sees linguistics as laying the foundation for all narratological study, since it offers insight into how narratives are constructed in their most primary context: everyday speech. She uses a linguistic model designed for "natural" narrative to explicate the organizational structure of "artificial" narrative texts, primarily from the Middle Ages and the postmodern period, whose seemingly idiosyncratic use of tenses has long perplexed those who study them. Fleischman develops a functional theory of tense and aspect in narrative that accounts for the wide variety of functions-pragmatic as well as grammatical-that these two categories of grammar are called upon to perform in the linguistic economy of a narration.

Questions about the development of the Romance future have engaged scholars since Thielmann's classic statement of 1885, yet a century later a number of the fundamental issues remain unresolved. Professor Fleischman suggests that this is in part due to the narrow sense in which the question has traditionally been formulated - as simply the history of the `future-tense' slot in the grammar - and in part the result of the investigative approach, which until recently has taken little account of important advances in general linguistics in the field of diachronic syntax. The present volume examines 'future' as a conceptual category and discusses the various strategies that have been used to map this conceptual category on to grammar in Romance. The data are taken in the main from Western Romance languages, particularly French, and frequent parallels are drawn with English. To account for the evolution of the future, Professor Fleischman proposes a network of interrelated, often cyclical developments in syntax and semantics, and seeks to place the individual diachronic events within a broader framework of syntactic typology and universal patterns of word-order change.

First published in 1990, this collection investigates grammatical categories associated with the verb as they are used by speakers and writers in real discourses and texts. Focusing on tense, aspect, mood, and voice in French, Spanish, and Italian, each chapter underscores the importance of context in our understanding of how grammatical categories work. Above and beyond their basic ‘grammatical functions’, categories of the verb are shown to operate in such capacities as structuring information in discourse, establishing point of view in a text, and creating textual cohesion. Importantly, this volume reflects the crucial role discourse-pragmatics factors play in our interpretation of the meanings of categories of grammar.