A feature of performed narrative
The Conversational Historical Present
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2880552 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nessa Wolfson (University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1978 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 215-237 |
| Publication date | 1978-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language in Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0047-4045 • E-ISSN: 1469-8013 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0047404500005534 |
| OpenAlex | W2101080711 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 52 |
| References cited | 4 |
The historical present, the use of the present tense to refer to past events, is a feature of narrative which has long been recognized. The object of this analysis is the use of the historical present tense specifically in narratives which occur in everyday conversational interactions. This usage will be referred to as the conversational historical present to distinguish it from the use of this tense in other genres such as travelogues and jokes. In the analysis of the occurrence of the conversational historical present, it was found that features of the relationship between the speaker and the audience had a strong influence. This is true not because the use of the linguistic feature itself is socially stratified, but rather because it functions as one of a set of features which appear in a specific type of narrative and is therefore governed by norms of interaction which constrain the social behavior involved in the recounting of such narratives. The fact that the use of the conversational historical present is an interactional variable in this respect has had important theoretical and methodological implications for the analysis which is reported here. The basic theoretical point is that in the study of the conversational historical present one sees a perfect example of the relationship between linguistic structure and language use
Conjunction (astronomy) · Feature (linguistics) · Linguistics · Narrative · Object (grammar) · Present tense · Set (abstract data type) · Sociology · Verb · Computer Science · History · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition · Philosophy · Psychology · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies
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Acquiring authority through the acquisition of genre
Discourse Quotatives in Australian English
Person shift at narrative peak
Outliers, impact, and rationalization in linguistic change
Identifying Practice
Mother and friends in a Holocaust life story
The Conversational Historical Present in Oral Spanish Narratives
Boys gossip telling
El presente histórico en el discurso reportado en contextos narrativos
When to prefer split-self conceptions
Direct evidentiality in the grammar of English
Narrative present in the Spanish of Santiago, Chile
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Re-examining narrativity
The chronological I
Re-membering Daddy
Personal narratives
Frequency and variation in the community grammar
The diachrony of quotation
Reported dialogue and pragmatic particles in the narratives of preadolescents
Quotatives in English and Spanish among bilinguals
Telling the Monolinguals from the Bilinguals
Switching codes and registers
The force of reportive narratives
The compliment as a social strategy
The Language of Life and Death
Tense variation in narrative
Tense and Aspect in Oral Spanish Narrative
Comparing bilinguals' quoted performances of self and others in tellings of the same experience in two languages
Disappearing Discourse
Personal narrative, performance, performativity
Narrative and the Catalan go-past
Narrative performance in a dying language
Morphology and Markedness
The "Labovian Model" Revisited With Special Consideration of Literary Narrative
Affect in Japanese women’s letter writing
Another story
"Uy, no! ¡Mirá lo que pasó!". Uso de recursos evaluativos en narrativas de ficción por niños pequeños de poblaciones urbano-marginadas
I jigglyfucked you with Luigi!”
The role of sociocognitive salience in the acquisition of structured variation and linguistic diffusion
Narratives of Somatizing and Non somatizing Patients in a Primary Care Setting
We Knew That’s It
My family wouldn’t have survived, and I would not be here
On Tense Alternation and the Need for Analysis of Native Speaker Usage in Second Language Acquisition
Discours direct chez les jeunes
An analysis of speaker role inhabitance in narratives of personal experience
Oral versions of personal experience
Interruption revisited
Some structural consequences of diffusion
Instigating
The Shifting Now
| Unique citing works | 52 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,13 |
| Citation span | 1980 - 2026 (47) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 44 |