Discourse Analysis: Tense and Aspect in Discourse (discourse_WiSe2011)

The temporal organization of language is reflected in the linguistic categories of tense and aspect. Roughly speaking, tense concerns the location of an event relative to the moment of utterance (past, present, future), while aspect expresses the internal temporal constituency' of an event (e.g. progressive vs. non-progressive). English has two (so-called absolute') tenses expressing past time reference (simple present, present perfect), a present tense and (at least) two future tenses (will-future, going to-future). Moreover, there are relative' tenses like the pluperfect (I had just left when ...) and the future in the past' (He knew that he would never see her again). Most of these tenses can be freely combined with both progressive and nonprogressive aspect (e.g. I have lived here for five years vs. I have been living here for five years). As a result, there is a considerable number of tense-aspect combinations, some of which can be used to express rather subtle differences in meaning (e.g. Will you be coming to the party vs. Will you come to the party?). In this course we will analyze the various tense-aspect categories of English and apply the analyses to textual samples from narratives. The aim of the course is to provide students with a better understanding of the tense-aspect system of English and to create an awareness of how tense and aspect can be used in both literary and everyday language to achieve specific semantic and pragmatic effects.