I don't mean to take up so much air time, but I've wanted to send a note
about teaching "tense" since the question was raised, & since I've started,
I'll go ahead and THEN be quiet.

Bob asked an interesting question when he referred to Biber's corpus
research to note the prevalence of the past perfect in fiction, but I'd ask
it somewhat differently.

In my own view, a formal approach to register choices [use THIS tense when
you write THIS sort of text] is too prescriptive; it doesn't allow a writer
to use their writing to make, explore, or test meaning. BUT our knowledge of
register and genre -- the sort of form-function relations that Biber
identifies (e.g., simple past occurs much more in fiction than in everyday
talk) -- can help us to present language forms in terms of what they do. The
question that arises from corpus research is, how? - how do we make use of
it?

As a start, we can tell students that the simple past presents events as if
they have already occurred and are done, finished, caput -- as if we can
look backwards at them; in fact, when we talk to someone, we usually are
talking about things happening now, going on around us in the present -- so
we actually don't use simple past very much in ordinary conversation. BUT
it's very useful for narrativizing -- for rendering what happens as
something that has already taken place and can be ordered in time, with a
beginning, middle, and end.

Tense relates one point in time (usually the moment of speaking) to another
point in time. Ann Evans asked a while back about tenses, and Bruce Despain
answered
that English had evolved
"a quite complex structure of aspect, voice, mode, and tense."
I agree with Bruce that a discussion of tense in English is not very helpful
in itself. I think a discussion of aspect in English is also not very
helpful in itself. These two terms yield only abstractions that I, for one,
don't find useful in writing OR for any concepualization of their role in
the linguistic system.

But TOGETHER, in juxtaposition, they do powerful things, they make it
possible to move "around" events, inside and out of them, to shift
perspective in multiple ways. Simple past PLUS imperfective aspect do much
of the work of narrative -- ordering events not only in relation to the time
of speaking/writing but also to one another, making it possible, for
instance, to "open up" an event that happened (Jane walked to the store) and
to represent the world as if it were STILL happening (while she _was
walking_, something ELSE happened).

It would seem that presenting "tense" and "aspect" (and later, other
resources for marking temporality and point of view) in the context of
narrative or as problems of narrativizing (tell a story in which.... ) --
and THEN pointing out the form-function relations, would be a more promising
approach than simply formal explanation.

Judy

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