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Article published In:
Narrative Inquiry
Vol. 30:2 (2020) ► pp.381–403

Grammatical uniformity of tense and aspect

Encoding narrator’s perspective and vantage point through Tense Shift

| University of Washington

This paper explores the pragmatic effects of Tense Shift in an Urdu narrative. A linguistic analysis of the semantic and pragmatic effects of Tense Shift is proposed. A key claim of this analysis is that the mechanisms of Tense Shift exist in sentence-level grammar in Urdu. The analysis seeks to provide an explanation for some of the properties of Tense Shift that have been pointed out in previous studies of Tense Shift in other languages. The paper discusses as well the extent to which this analysis is expected to apply to narratives in languages other than Urdu.

Keywords: narrative discourse, linguistic approach, tense and aspect shift, syntax, semantics, pragmatics
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
    • Previous analyses
    • The markedness approach (Fleischman 1990)
    • New analytical theory: Motivations and importance
  • New approach: Grammatical Uniformity of Tense and Aspect (GUTA)
    • Theoretical background of GUTA
    • Temporal relations at sentence level
    • Temporal primitives: From sentences to narrative discourse
    • Tense and aspect in Urdu narrative and application of GUTA to Urdu examples
      • Passage 1 Umrao Jan Ada (1987, p. 39) (Urdu)
      • Passage 2 Umrao Jan Ada (1987, p. 81)
      • Present tense – progressive aspect
      • Present tense – perfect aspect
      • Past tense – perfective aspect
  • Conclusions
    • Evidence based claims
    • Linguistic claims: Tense – narrator’s location and aspect – narrator’s perception
    • Scope of GUTA across languages and narrative discourses
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.19005.cha
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