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The current paper examines the statistical correlation between a number of cotextual cues and the latent variable of perspective in a corpus of episodes taken from Livy's narrative. The possible perspectives (external, internal, scenic camera-eye, immersive eyewitness and distanced eyewitness; cf. "focalization" in narratological studies) featured...
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... de tekstuele omgeving (Thompson, 2014, p. 217). 10 De theorievorming over deze 'cotextuele aanwijzingen' is gebaseerd op Anderson & Keenan (1985), McIntyre (2006) en Stockwell (2002); de meerwaarde voor de annotatie van perspectief in Latijnse verhalen werd reeds aangetoond in Aerts (2019a.). Deze 'cotextuele aanwijzingen' zijn vaak variabelen van zo'n aard dat zij (a) een tweetal tegengestelde waarden omvatten, en (b) helemaal niet altijd van belang zijn. ...
The current paper defends the existence of aspect in Latin by proposing a three-dimensional (SFL-inspired) interpretation of both aspect and tense. The traditional usage labels of the tenses can all be framed within the framework proposed in this paper. Moreover, the interpersonal meaning of perspective, similar to focalization, adds an important interpretation of many tenses and their textual surroundings. The ultimate tense choice in narratives usually depends on the most important dimension of meaning, along a certain metafunctional hierarchy. Such a multidimensional interpretation of the tenses may inspire an authentic reading experience and boost the development of pupils' cognitive and linguistic capacities.
... de tekstuele omgeving (Thompson, 2014, p. 217). De theorievorming over deze "cotextuele aanwijzingen' is gebaseerd op Anderson & Keenan (1985), MclIntyre (2006) en Stockwell (2002); de meerwaarde voor de annotatie van perspectief in Latijnse verhalen werd reeds aangetoond in Aerts (2019a.). Deze "cotextuele aanwijzingen' zijn vaak variabelen van zo'n aard dat zij (a) een tweetal tegengestelde waarden omvatten, en (b) helemaal niet altijd van belang zijn. ...
The current paper defends the existence of aspect in Latin by proposing a three-dimensional(SFL-inspired) interpretation of both aspect and tense. The traditional usage labelsof the tenses can all be framed within the framework proposed in this paper. Moreover,the interpersonal meaning of perspective, similar to focalization, adds an important interpretationof many tenses and their textual surroundings. The ultimate tense choice in narrativesusually depends on the most important dimension of meaning, along a certainmetafunctional hierarchy. Such a multidimensional interpretation of the tenses mayinspire an authentic reading experience and boost the development of pupils’ cognitiveand linguistic capacities.
In this paper, Livy's use of the Latin narrative tenses is examined from a functionalist point of view. Assuming that three levels of meaning (referential, textual and interpersonal) potentially underly paradigmatic choices in grammatical systems, "tense" and "aspect" are conceived of as three-dimensional categories related to the communicative intentions involved in the narrative tenses. Close-readings of episodes with that conception in mind reveal the significant role played by grammatical aspect in the Latin tense system. In addition, the interpersonal meaning of "perspective" (e.g. authorial vs. eyewitness report) is shown to be often involved in Livy's use of the tenses. Most importantly, the 3D-framework adopted in this study allows for a systematic categorization of all uses of the narrative tenses.
The Classical Latin verb system displays a twofold morphological distinction between perfectum and infectum tenses, based on the verb stems of which the exact nature - relative tense (e.g. Pinkster 1983, 2015; Kroon 2007; Adema 2008) vs. grammatical aspect (e.g. Touratier 1994; Oldsjö 2001; Haverling 2010) - has been a matter of much debate. The discussion comes down to the question whether grammatical aspect is required as a category to be able to account for the language data. With regard to the Late Latin system, the supposedly full grammaticalization (cf. Kiss 1982) of the additional analytical construction with habere + past participle, which was reportedly increasingly necessary to make the aspectual meaning of resultativity explicit, and which was the forerunner of the Romance descendants, has been questioned in recent research (Ţâra 2014; Haverling 2016). In this context of theoretical discord, I propose to appreciate both tense and aspect in their full semantic potential using a modern Systemic Functional Linguistic approach (Bache 2008), which is applied to a corpus made up of excerpts from Gregory of Tours’ historiographical narrative.
SFL recognizes three metafunctions or levels of meaning, on which language phenomena such as tense and aspect may potentially express meaning, as identified by means of a range of cotextual cues (for the threefold interpretation of grammatical aspect, cf. Coseriu 1980, Boogaart 2004). First, on the ideational level, our conception of reality is construed: ideational tense locates a state of affairs with respect to the speech moment, while ideational aspect construes a state of affairs as terminated or unterminated at reference time. Second, on the textual level, a narrative is presented as a structured whole, i.e. with a foreground and a background. Textual tense contributes to this distinction by virtue of the nature of the tenses (absolute tense vs. absolute-relative tense), while textual aspect presents foregrounded events as globally viewed, indivisible wholes, and backgrounded situations as partially viewed states of affairs. Third, on the interpersonal level, the narrator invites his audience to take an external or internal perspective on the states of affairs. Interpersonal tense conveys this idea by linking a state of affairs to the deictic centre (retrospective hindsight) or by identification with a past reference point (a story-internal character), while interpersonal aspect invites the audience to take a viewpoint from without (story-external knowledge) or from within (experience, reasoning, etc. of the characters).
This SFL-inspired approach provides both relative tense theory and aspectual theory with a potentially stronger claim, allowing them to account for more language data with only one model. A thorough close reading of a number of text excerpts from Gregory of Tours’ Historia Francorum shows that in a significant number of cases, aspectual values are necessary for the correct interpretation of the verb tenses. Such case studies seem to indicate that aspect was still a relevant category in the Late Latin verb system, even for the still prevalent synthetic perfect, supporting the claim that the analytical perfect had not fully grammaticalized before the start of the Romance languages.
