ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the register of narrative, the ‘configuration of semantic resources’ that users of English associate with a text identified as a narrative; overall, it contrasts the particular and dynamic construal of experience in narrative with the general and static construal in ‘scientific’ discourse. It describes Halliday’s use of ‘tense’ (‘primary and secondary’) and ‘aspect’ (realis and irrealis in language); Whorf on two- and three-tense systems; McTaggert’s A and B series. It suggests the effects on English of the oral to literate transition pre-1100 (emergence of the three-tense system) and the manuscript to print culture transition post-1500 (both ‘the development of science’ and ‘the rise of the novel’). Using the SFL concepts of logical projection and expansion, it describes the complexity of meaning in narrative ‘voice’ and in narrative particularity in order to analyse in detail three narrative texts/extracts (from a spontaneous speech and two novels of 1857 and 2013). The chapter concludes with an extreme example of expansion from Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.
