Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores temporal patterning in two different corpora of oral contes in modern French, and, as a point of comparison, in a corpus of conversational narrations. It considers a variety of theoretical questions which bear on the analysis which follows, defining terms where possible and highlights problematic issues. The book discusses the models of tense usage found, asking which are the key narrative tenses in the different types of narration, to what extent the phenomenon of tense-switching is evident, and how the attested patterns might be systematized in theoretical terms. It concentrates on the function of the different types of tense-switching found. The book also considers other elements of temporal patterning in the syntax, notably adverbials, connectors, subordinators, and coordinators, as well as the use of parataxis.