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The current paper investigates the three-dimensional meaning potential of the Late Latin narrative tenses. The grammatical categories ‘tense’ and ‘aspect’ are hypothesized to express meaning on the three metafunctional levels posited by Systemic Functional Linguistics. Combinations of their ideational and textual dimensions can be used to classify...
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Context 1
... story of the nuns of Poitiers, however, occurred during Gregory's adult life, and he has had a very large role to play in it. Consider Fig. 2: Gregory seems eager to retain his neutrality in narrating these events and his role in them. Instead of the distanced eyewitness perspective, he uses the neutral perspective far more often, as well as the immersive eyewitness perspective. Both these attitudes to the events of the texts leave little room for evaluative commentary on ...
Citations
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 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 in Latin historiographical narratives are introduced and hypothesized to co-occur with a number of lexical (e.g. evaluative, descriptive), deictic (e.g. proximal, distal) and grammatical (e.g. voice) elements in the cotext of events and situations occurring in the main narrative tenses (especially the perfect, imperfect, and present indicative). During the analysis, statistical tests are used to ascertain the combined impact of these cues on (a) Livy's choice of verb tense and (b) the linguist's annotation of perspective. While the former is objectively observable, the latter relies on the functional linguist's interpretation as a non-native speaker. Therefore, an additional test is used to show the correlations between the different narrative tenses and the perspectives to corroborate the results. This paper's findings pave the way for a more systematic and objective annotation method for the latent variable of perspective in Latin narratives. Its argumentation is built on the statistical tests performed on the data gathered in close readings on a larger scale. From those close readings, some examples are provided in the current paper to illustrate specific or challenging concepts.
