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Tense and Aspect in Oral Spanish Narrative: Context and Meaning Author(s): Carmen Silva-Corvaln Reviewed work(s): Source: Language, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Dec., 1983), pp. 760-780 Published by: Linguistic Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/413372 . Accessed: 29/12/2011 12:44
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TENSE AND ASPECT IN ORAL SPANISH NARRATIVE: CONTEXT AND MEANING

CARMEN SILVA-CORVALAN

University of Southern California

This quantitative and qualitative study of the distribution of tense and aspect in oral Spanish narrative shows that the meaning of certain verb forms is in part delimited by the narrative structural context in which they occur. The historical present/preterit alternation, an issue that has attracted recent controversy (Wolfson 1979, Schiffrin 1981) is examined, and the results show that the Spanish historical present functions as an internal evaluation mechanism.*

This paper deals with the distribution of tense and aspect in oral Spanish narrative, focusing specifically on the function of the simple present tense.' I adopt as starting point the tense-aspect system proposed for Spanish by the Real Academia Espafiola (1979).2 which is almost identical with that of Gili
* Earlier and shorter versions of this paper were presented at NWAVE X, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at LSRL XII at the Pennsylvania State University. I am grateful to conference participants for their helpful comments. I am particularly indebted to Deborah Schiffrin and Nessa Wolfson for their willingness to discuss with me, at length, their work and my work on narrative. I also wish to express thanks to Leland McCleary, Marisa Rivero, Joel Sherzer, and Sandra Thompson for useful suggestions and criticism. Only narratives which contained at least one occurrence of the historical present were included. The Chilean data were selected from transcripts of conversations recorded by me in Santiago in 1978, and include narratives from a variety of speakers. The Mexican narratives were selected from the transcribed and published materials for the study of Mexico City speech (UNAM 1971). The sample includes a total of 30 narratives, 27 from the Chilean data and 3 from the Mexican data, selected on the basis of the same methodological consideration: the occurrence of present/preterit alternation. With respect to this feature, I found no differences between the Mexican and Chilean narratives. 2 The system proposed by the Real Academia includes three non-finite forms-infinitive (cantar 'to sing'), gerund (cantando 'singing'), participle (cantado 'sung')-and three moods: indicative, subjunctive, imperative. Below I illustrate the finite forms with the 2sg. form of the verb cantar 'to sing' (the independent pronoun tu 'you' is not expressed): INDICATIVE MOOD (simple tenses) Present: cantas 'you sing' cantabas'you sang' Imperfect: Preterit: cantaste 'you sang' Future: cantards 'you will sing' Conditional: cantarias'you would sing'
SUBJUNCTIVEMOOD(simple tenses)

Present: Imperfect: Future: Present:

cantes cantaras or cantases (these two forms are almost interchangeable) cantares

IMPERATIVE MOOD

canta 'sing!' The corresponding compound forms are constructed with haber 'to have' + the participle (e.g. has cantado 'you have sung'). The progressive forms are constructed with estar 'to be' + the gerund (e.g. estds cantando 'you are singing'). 760

TENSE AND ASPECT IN ORAL SPANISH NARRATIVE

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Gaya 1961, and is followed by most Spanish grammarscurrentlyin use (e.g. Alcina & Blecua 1980). In the analysis of narrativestructure,I use the framework proposed by Labov 1972and by Labov & Waletzky 1967,and show that the simple present tense occurs more frequentlyat certaincriticalpoints in the narrative. It is the thesis of this paper that this co-occurrence of form and context determines in large part the meaningof the verbal form. The point that meaningresults from a relationshipbetween form and context is not new. Thus Firth 1957explicitly proposed the need to apply the concepts of COLLOCATION (i.e. syntagmaticassociations of lexical items) and CONTEXT OF SITUATION (which includes both verbal and non-verbalcontext) to the study of linguistic meaning. He suggested that part of the meaningof a word is given by its collocation with immediatelypreceding and/or following lexical items. In a narrowerdefinition of CONTEXT, closer to Firth's notion of collocation, Davison (1978:35)demonstratesthat the context is crucialto the interpretation of negative scope and indefinitenoun phrasesin certainconstructionsof HindiUrdu. Similarly, in a study of the meaning of the Spanish preterit, Bolinger of (1963:133)concludes that the preterit'refersto a SEGMENT anteriority',while the more specific inceptive or terminativemeaningof this form is 'imposed by
CONTEXTS' (emphasis added). In a similar vein, particular verbs in PARTICULAR

Garcia 1975has stated, following A. G. Hatcher, that 'the controllablecontext' (xxi) is a prerequisiteto our understandingof the relationshipbetween form and meaning. In this paper, CONTEXT used to refer to the naturaldiscourse is (specificallyoral narrative)in which the verbalforms occur. This methodology, which considers the syntax and semantics of sentences in naturalspeech, has recently been followed by numerouslinguists.3 Verbal forms relevant to my discussion include the progressive and nonprogressiveforms of the present, the preterit,and the imperfectin the indicative mood. I propose that each verbalform has a generalmeaningwhich determines its possible patternsof occurrencein discourse. However, this generalmeaning may in part overlap with that of anotherform; only in the context of a speech event (e.g. the various sections of a narrative)do form-specific meanings become evident-blocking the possibility of replacing a form, and at the same time retainingthe speaker's communicativeintent. The generalmeaningor functionassigned by the Real Academiato the verbal forms underconsiderationmay be summarizedas follows: The presentfocuses on an event, which may co-exist with the moment of speaking, without considerationof its temporal limits. The historical present is used in narrationto present past events as if they were occurringat the moment of speaking. The preteritfocuses on the inception or terminationof an event in a time anterior to the moment of speaking. The imperfect also presents events in the pastas durative, iterative, or habitual, but without reference to their point of inception or termination.The presentand the imperfecthave imperfectiveaspect, while the preterit is perfective; i.e., it indicates that the action has been com3 See, among others, various contributions in the collections edited by Giv6n 1979 and by KleinAndreu 1983.

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 4 (1983)

pleted. The correspondingprogressiveforms focus on the durationand/orprogression of the event. Labov (359-60) has defined narrativeas 'one method of recapitulating past experience by matchinga verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred)actually occurred'. The verbal sequence consists of independentnarrativeclauses which are temporallyordered;i.e., they matchthe order of the events. Other syntactic means of recapitulating same experithe ences-e.g. embeddingand the use of the past perfect, which reverse the order of the events-are not considered as constitutingnarrativeclauses. However, other types of narrativeclauses exist: the restrictedand the coordinatedtypes, which may be displacedover partof the narrativewithoutalteringthe semantic interpretationof the order of the events. A fully developed narrative may show the following elements (Labov 1972:363):abstract, orientation, complicatingaction, evaluation, result or resolution, and coda. With the exception of the coda, these are illustratedin ex. 1, a narrativetold by a 16-year-old:4
(1) a. Por ejemplo, en sociales, jamas. No podemos. b. Ese profesor las sabe todas. Se llama el De la Fuente. Se sabe todo, todo. c. Lo pill6 a uno y lo dej6 paralizado d. Esos profesores que, nunca le vai a tomar mala porque - eh - es como quien dice, a ver, si te pilla haciendo algo malo, te liquida, pero de una forma simpdtica, iah? Por ejemplo, uno - mm se sentaba delante mio, e. no sabia nada, ;ah? f. Yo no le podia soplar porque me iban a pillar, nada. Ese profesor me pilla, yo se que me pillaba.

orientation

abstract

For example, in social sciences, never. We can't. That teacher knows all the tricks. His name is De la Fuente. He knows everything, everything. He caughtone and left him speechless. Those teachers that, you're never going to dislike him
because - eh - he's like,

orientationand evaluation

let's see if he finds you doing somethingwrong, he'll bust you, but in a nice way, eh?
For instance, one - mm -

sat in front of me, he didn't know anything, eh? I couldn't tell him the answers because they were going to catch me, nothing. That teacher catches me, I know he'd catch me.

4 Some of the clauses in the examples are lettered for ease of reference in the discussion. Informationabout the speakeris presentedwithinparenthesesat the end: first-nameinitial,sex, and age. A shortdash (-) indicatesa briefpause;an ellipsis (...) indicatesthat some languagematerial, irrelevantto the discussion, has been omitted. A diagonalline (/) is used to indicateinterruption either by oneself or by another speaker. A subscriptedletter (i) markscoreferentialitybetween arguments.The Mexican narrativesare identifiedby page number.

TENSE AND ASPECT IN ORAL SPANISH NARRATIVE g. Entonces boto el, el, el cuaderno de sociales al suelo, h. y con el pie lo daba vuelta, la hoja, i. y miraba de arriba p'abajo asi j. y estaba copiando lo mds feliz v contento. k. Ya iba en la sexta ya. 1. El profesor estaba en la otra esquina. m. Y a esto que el profesor le, le hace asi (gesture) salta un banco, salta otro, salta una fila, corre, va corriendo asi, de esto a lo 'lolo' asi el profesor, de una esquina a la otra, lo pilla y le dice, 'Te pille,' le dice asi. Y el gallo se congela asi Todo el mu-, todo el curso muerto de la risa, porque en una forma le dijo, ';Ah! iTe pille!' le dijo asi. Mira, el gallo se congel6 asi. Le dijo, 'Pdseme la hoja.' Le hizo asi (gesture), chistosamente. Entonces el gallo queda, 'Pero senor, es que yol' 'No. Usted son6. El que puede copiar, copia pues, y el que lo pillo lo liquido, pues, dice Asi que le puso un uno. (L,m,16)

763

narrative clause

restricted clauses

orientation

narrative clauses

n.

restricted clause

o.

narrative clauses

p.

evaluation

q.

r. s.

narrative clauses

t.

resolution

Then he dropped the, the, the social sciences notebook on the floor, ? and with the foot he'd c CZ turn it over, the page, 9o and he'd look from top to bottom like this .~ g and he was copying so happily. E He was in the sixth one already. The teacher was in the other corner. And suddenly the teacher goes, goes like this (gesture), he jumps a desk, jumps another, * jumps a row, ct runs, he goes running like this, like a teen-ager C) the teacher, from one E corner to the other, 0 catches him and tells him, 'I caught you,' he tells him like this. And the guy freezes. Everyone, the whole class was cracking up, because he said it in such a way, 'Ah! I caught you!' he said it like this. See, the guy froze. He told him, 'Pass me your test.' He went like this c 0' (gesture), very funny. Then the guy goes, 'But sir, see, I/' .1 'No. You lose. . If you can cheat, you E cheat, 0 but if I catch you, I'll bust you up, he says. So he gave him an F.

1. TENSEANDASPECT DISTRIBUTION. elements which Labov calls abThe

stracts are not very frequent in the conversational narrativesexamined (i.e. narrativeswhich arise in conversation, without being purposely elicited). Of

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME59, NUMBER 4 (1983)

the 30 narrativesstudied, only 6 have an abstract;in all instances, it is encoded in the preterit.The abstractsummarizesthe story, as seen in lc; i.e., it conveys the most salient events in a nutshell. The clauses in the abstract are thus sequentialand foregrounded(in the sense definedby Hopper& Thompson 1980); one expects them to be coded in the preteritratherthan the imperfect. in a tight form; the various actions occur in a chain-likefashion, with no long time lapses between them. In conversational narratives,the abstract may be created interactively by the speakers:
(2) V: ... pienso yo que uno se siente mds segura diciendo, 'Mira. Estoy pololeando con el.' Porquel I: e Y cudndo entonces empiezan a pololear, o sea, que establece que ya estdn pololeando? V: La iinical - El hecho de decir, 'Estoy pololeando,' nada mcis. I: gPero quiMnlo dice, tu o el? ... I think that one feels safer saying, 'See. I'm going steady with him.' Because/ So when do you start going steady, that is, what determines that you're going steady'? The only/ - The fact that you say, 'I'm going steady,' nothing else. But who says that, you or him?

In the narratives where abstracts do occur,5 the series of events is presented

V: Bueno. En este casofuimos los dos. Me

dijol Un dia esttbamos, el veinticuatro, que es dia feriado ... (V, f,

Well. In this case both of us. He told me/

One day we were, the twenty-fourth, which is a holiday ...

16)

The above passage illustrates how conversation leads up to a narrative.The summarymay be reconstructedin the interactionthat precedes it; thus, when V starts narrating(Un dia estabamos 'One day we were'), the listener already knows the outcome of the events. Informationabout the time, place, participantsin the events, and situation may be given in separate orientationsections (e.g. Id-f) or as part of the narrative clauses (Ig). The most frequent tense in the orientation sections is the imperfect, illustratedin 11.Of a total of 135 orientationclauses, 94 (70%)are in the imperfect, 16 (12%)are in the present, and 10 (7%)are in the imperfect progressive. Other forms used, with frequencies below 5%, are the preterit (progressive and non-progressive),the present progressive, and the periphrastic construction with ir a + infinitive 'going to', both in the present (Id) and in the imperfect.6 This distributionof verbalforms accords with the correlationbetween backgroundedclauses and imperfectiveaspect suggested by Hopper & Thompson, and also with the functionsassignedto verbalforms in the grammars Spanish. of Thus Alcina & Blecua (1980:795), Bello & Cuervo (1977:221), and Ramsey (1956:317)agree that, in narration,the imperfectis used mainlyto describe the places, persons, things, and conditions necessary to orient the listener/reader.
5 A statement announcingthat the ensuingspeech event is a narrative,e.g. I'm going to tell you something, does not constitute an abstract here (cf. Lavandera 1981 for an opposite view). McCleary(p.c.) notes that this is an initial counterpartof the coda; he suggests calling it the
PRELUDE.

6 In an (59) notes that the 'imperfect analysis of one narrativeby a Chicanospeaker, Lavandera seems to be specialized for the contexts that providethe orientation.'I show later in this paper that the imperfectalso occurs in restrictedclauses, which are partof the complicatingaction.

TENSE AND ASPECT IN ORAL SPANISH NARRATIVE

765

In my data, 48% of all imperfect forms occur in orientation sections, 38% in evaluation sections (which are also in part descriptive), and only 13% in the complicating action. The data show that other verbal forms also have this orientation function. The present is used to describe the participants when the features described are INDEPENDENT the events described in the narrative (cf. Ib, d)-and, of of course, when what is described co-exists with the time at which the narrative is told (i.e. speech time).7 The imperfect, however, describes entities, states, actions, and conditions that existed both before and during the time of the narrative (reference time being prior to speech time); and it also describes narrative-specific conditions, i.e. THOSE THAT WERE TRUE ONLY AT THE TIME WHEN THE NARRATIVE EVENTS TOOK PLACE (simultaneous with event time, e.g. le-f). Given that one function of the imperfect is identical with that of the orientation (to present a background to an event), it is not surprising that the imperfect occurs in orientations. In this context, the imperfect frequently conveys the meaning of co-existence with narrative events, rather than that of repeated or habitual actions (e.g. le,l). What is important, then, is that the orientation context cancels out the meaning of repetition, although this (plus co-existence) is a possible interpretation in other contexts. Labov (364) observes that, in English narratives,
'it is quite common to find a great many past progressive clauses in the orientation sectionsketching the kind of thing that was going on before the first event of the narrative occurred or during the entire episode.'

But in Spanish, which has a oinary formal distinction between imperfective and perfective past, the progressive forms are not called to do double duty for imperfect aspect; thus the imperfect progressive is not common in orientation (7%), and the preterit progressive even less so (about 1%). Rather, progressive constructions occur in restricted clauses as part of the complicating action, as illustrated by lj. The coda and the resolution appear to have partly overlapping functions in Labov's definition (365-6, 369-70). Thus it may be both the resolution (because it answers the question 'What finally happened?') and the coda (because it shows the effects of the events). However, codas have a more general function-namely, indicating that the end of the narrative has been reached, by an overt expression like Y eso fue todo 'And that was it' or Y eso fiue lo que nos cont6 'And that's what he told us.' This type of coda occurs in only 2 of the 30 narratives; i.e., it is as infrequent as abstracts in conversational narratives. Just as a narrative frequently flows into the conversation without a formal abstract, so the end of a narrative may not be marked by any formulaic expres7 Reichenbach 1947 proposes three notions of time for temporal specification: REIFERENCE TIME, established in relation to the time of speaking; EVENT TIME, established in relation to other events; and SPEECH TIME, the actual time of speaking. I follow this framework in my analysis: the reference time is understood to be the time at which the narrative events took place, prior to the speech time.

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 4 (1983)

sion. The resolution then leads to other narratives or other types of speech events.8 The coda-resolution, by contrast, occurs in all the narratives: in 22 cases in the preterit (76%), and in 7 cases in the historical present (24%).9 Exx. 3-6 will illustrate:
(3) Narrative about premonitions: Y a las seis de la tarde Ilega (hist. pres.) mi papd con los gringos. (V, f, 16) 'And at six in the evening my dad comes home with the gringos. (4) Narrative about father's illness: Lo llevan, y le sale (hist. pres.) limpio el pulm6n. (H, m, 33) 'They take him, and the lung comes out clean.' (5) Narrative about meeting future husband: Y con ese me case (pret.) (Mexico, p. 142) 'And that one I married.' (6) Narrative about cheating at school: Nos pusieron (pret.) un uno coma cinco. (T, f, 16) 'They gave us a grade of 1.5.' 2. COMPLICATING THE ACTION WITH THE HISTORICALPRESENT. The complicat-

ing action in narrative 1 begins with clause Ig. This clause initiates a series of narrative events which are continued in lh-k, lm-o, and lq-t.'? Note that preterit (P), imperfect (I), and present verb forms occur in this section of the narrative in specific types of clauses. Narrative clauses recapitulate past experience in the order in which events presumably occurred: thus Ig occurred before lh-k and before lm; and the events in lm occurred in a temporal sequence, one before the next. However, the clauses in lh-k are not temporally ordered with respect to one another; i.e., they may be reshuffled without altering the semantic interpretation of the order of the events. This effect is achieved by using the I, which indicates extended or continuous action. Thus a series of events in the I are interpreted as overlapping, or as occurring repeatedly in turns (cf. Lavandera). Encoded in the P, the events in lh-k could only be interpreted as occurring in a sequence with temporal juncture." The time reference of the P and the I is the same, viz. the point of the event; and the point of reference is prior to the point of speech. The difference between these two forms is aspectual; they correspond to different ways of viewing the flow of processes and states in the narrative-perfective and imperfective. Events reported in the perfective P are viewed 'as a single whole' (Comrie 1976:16); thus two consecutive verbs are interpreted to refer to two consecutive events, because the P does nowdistinguish between the separate phases which make up a situation. By contrast, because the imperfective allows for a breakdown of the internal
8 Labov & Waletzky observed the same in their study of English narratives. 9 The total does not add up to 30 because a case of morphological neutralization between preterit and present was left out (see fn. 11). 10 Note that the result (It) is here considered part of the complicating action clauses, since it also constitutes a narrative event. 1 TEMPORAL JUNCTURE exists between two clauses when a change in their order results in a change in the temporal sequence of the original semantic interpretation (Labov, 360).

TENSE AND ASPECT IN ORAL SPANISH NARRATIVE

767

temporal structure of a situation (Comrie, 16), events reported in the I corand CLAUSES, respond to what Labov & Waletzky call COORDINATE RESTRICTED

i.e. ones which may be interchangedwith no change in temporal sequence. Note that clauses lh,i,k are coordinate(they can be displacedover themselves to the left or the right);but lj is restricted, because it may be displaced over a larger number of clauses (before Ih to the left and before lo to the right). This difference of clause type corresponds to another aspectual difference in Spanish, the progressive (lj) vs. non-progressive(lh,j,k). Of two possible interpretationsof the I, habitualityand continuousness,only the latteris possible in the context of coordinate and restricted narrativeclauses, which refer to narrative-specificconditions; but both are possible in the orientationand evaluation sections. THE CONTEXT, then, DETERMINES THE SPECIFIC MEANING OF THE
FORM.

English lacks a morphologicalform correspondingto the Spanish I, though the same meaning may be conveyed by periphrasticconstructionswith would or used to, or by the past progressive. Of these, we would expect wouldand/or the past progressive to occur frequentlyin restrictedclauses. This expectation is confirmedby the reportsof Labov (387)and Schiffrin,both based on studies of English narratives. Progressive forms are not so frequent in Spanish.12In the total numberof restricted and coordinate clauses, the percentage of progressives is extremely low-2% (13/476), as compared to the 9% (73/784) reported by Schiffrin(57) for restrictedclauses in English. Clauses 7b-d further illustratethe use of the I in restrictedclauses:
(7) a. Entonces la lnes empez6 a golpearle las dos mejillas asi fi.erte, b. y el Hernan hacia 'Ja, ja,' pero no soltaba el llanto. c. iOy! La Ines rezaba d. y decia, 'Por mi ignorancia que se vava a morir un nifo.' (D, f, 68) Then Ines began to slap his two cheeks pretty hard, and Hernan went 'Ha, ha,' but he didn't start crying. Gee! Ines was praying and saying, 'Because of my ignorance a child may die.'

The other verbal forms which occur in the complicatingaction are the P and
PRESENT the present. This latter usage, referred to as the HISTORICAL (HP), and

its alternationwith the P, are examined in detail in what follows. In the narratives analysed, P and HP alternatein simple narrativeclauses to refer to the events whose reference time is prior to the moment of speaking. Of 476 narrative clauses, 156 (32.7%)verbs are in the HP.'3
12 In addition to the canonical progressive construction with estar + V-ndo 'be + V-ing', I have coded as progressive the periphrastic construction ir + V-ndo 'go + V-ing', e.g. .... va iiendo que el balcon estaba forcejeado '... she goes seeing that the balcony was forced.' This decision was made because the verb ir 'go' has here lost its lexical meaning of movement; it is used as a marker of person, number, and tense. These are the only types of progressives which occur in narrative clauses; they should be examined in depth by a further study. 13 This percentage is very similar to the result obtained by Schiffrin for English (30% of HP out of 1,288 clauses)-which seems to indicate that the two languages use the P/HP alternation in a similar way, and that this cross-linguistic similarity may respond to a universal pragmatic function. The totals in my study include only simple narrative clauses, i.e. no restricted or coordinate

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 4 (1983)

Observe that, in narrative1, the P occurs in lg,q,t, and the HP in lm-o,r,s. In other sections of the narrative,the P and the HP are not in variation.Thus, if the P used in the abstract(Ic) is replacedby a presentform, then the resulting clauses are interpretedas a statement of general truth, not as the abstract of a narrative:
(8) Lo pilla a uno y lo deja paralizado.

'He catches you and leaves you speechless.'

Other uses of the present, as in orientation clauses (la-b), or in reported speech (9), have as their axis of reference the moment of speaking, and could not be replaced by the P:
(9) Entonces dije yo, '; Y esta cuesti6n que es?' (pres.) 'Que estoy (pres.) embarazada, pues,' me dijo. (H. m, 33) Then I said, 'So what is this thing?' 'That I am pregnant,' she said to me.

In oral narrative, then, the P/HP alternationis possible only in narrative clauses with zero displacementsets, i.e. in clauses that are strictly orderedby temporal sequence and cannot be displaced over any other clauses. IN THE
CONTEXT OF THE COMPLICATING ACTION, THE HP THUS TAKES ON A PERFECTIVE

ASPECT. This implies that the simple present cannot alternate with the I in

restricted clauses: if the switch were made, the clause sequence would be interpretedas parallelto the temporalsequence of the events. This is illustrated by replacingthe I with the present in lh-i:
(10) g. Entonces bot6 el, el, el cuaderno de soThen he dropped the, the, the social sci-

ciales al suelo,
h. y con el pie lo da (pres.) vuelta, la hoja, i. y mira (pres.) de arriba p'abajo asi -

ences notebook on the floor,

and with the foot he turns it over, the

page,
and he looks from top to bottom like this -

Here 10h-i could only mean that the student turned one page over, and then looked at that page from top to bottom. In restrictedclauses, then, we would expect only the progressive form of the HP to occur, which is what I find in the data.'4 Studies of the Spanish verb assign a rhetoricalfunction to the HP, that of makingrecollections more vivid. However, the source of data for these studies and for most of the grammarscurrentlyin use (e.g. Alcina & Blecua, Bello & Cuervo, Bull 1960, Gili Gaya, Ramsey, Real Academia) is written Spanish; thus the rules they propose may not be automaticallyextended to speech.
types. Furthermore,12 narrativeclauses were excluded because they correspondedto cases of neutralization between presentand preterit,occurringin the Ipl. forms of first and morphological thirdconjugationverbs (i.e. with infinitivesin -ar and -ir): e.g.
V-ar V-ir nosotros cantamos nosotros subimos 'we sing' / 'we sang' 'we go up' / 'we went up'

Schiffrin(p.c.) did not exclude neutralizedforms (put, cut etc.) from some of her statistics. This appearsto be a methodologicalweakness. 14 The section of some HP/I alternation occurs, thoughrarely,in the orientation non-progressive narratives.

TENSE AND ASPECT IN ORAL SPANISH NARRATIVE

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Indeed, in a study of conversationalnarratives,Wolfson (1978:216)points out that the EnglishHP is used in genres that may use writingor speech as channels, 'but when spoken ... [the differentgenres] constitute speech events which have rules of their own, not shared by the rules for the speech events in which conversationalnarrativesoccur.' Likewise in Spanish, the exclusive use of the HP in 11, below, does not makethe narration morevivid, but simplyreproduces the rules for the use of the present in the description of events in a novelwhich are not necessarily the same as in speech. (None of the features of performednarrativesdiscussed by Wolfson are present in the account of this novel: no direct speech, no asides, no repetition, no expressive sounds, no sound effects, and no motion or gestures.)
(11) Pasa (pres.) en Massachusetts. Y las, se viene (pres.) ella a vivir a Maryland. EnIt happens in Massachusetts. And the, she comes to live in Maryland. Then when

tonces cuando se cambia (pres.), hay (pres.) un cambio bastante grande en ella porque conoce (pres.) a una nihia
que ella, que pensaba que no era adicta a las drogas pero tambien le hacia. Y empiezan (pres.) a revender drogas y, y al final esta nitia muere (pres.), muere (pres.) por demasiadas, ingerir demasiadas drogas. (V, f, 16)

she moves, a big change takes place in herbecause she meets a girlthat she, she thoughtshe wasn't addictedto drugsbut
she was. And they start to re-sell drugs and, and at the end this girl dies, dies of too many, consuming too many drugs.

view, in which the HP is assignedthe metaphorical Contraryto the traditional function of makingpast events more vivid or dramatic,by presentingthem as if they were occurringin front of our eyes,15Wolfson 1978, 1979proposes that the conversationalHP has no significance in itself; rather,it is the ALTERNATION of P and HP which is said to constitute an expressive feature.16Furthermore, the switching of tenses is found to function as a device that separates events from one another. I investigateWolfson's analysis in what follows, and present Spanish evidence to show that the switching is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to separate events. Furthermore,this evidence supports the expressive function of the HP in Spanish. The markingof separate events is discussed first. It has already been shown that different sections of the narrativecorrelate with differentverb tenses. Narrative I startswith an orientationin the present. The switch to P in Ic signals a differentsection, the abstract.The switch back to present correlates with a returnto orientation;and a furtherswitch to I in le indicates that the orientation is now directed to the time of the narrative events. It thus seems possible that the switch between P and HP may also function to separate sections or types of narrativeclauses. However, I have in also shown that these two tenses may alternateONLY the simplest narrative clauses which occur in the complicating action section. Therefore it is clear
15

In addition to the Spanish studies already mentioned, this view has been upheld in analyses

of the HP in Englishby Jespersen 1931, Joos 1964, and Leech 1971,amongothers. 16 In an earlier study, Wolfson 1974 proposed an opposite analysis, namely that the HP is a stylistic device used to bringthe audience into emotionalproximitywith the story and with the story-teller.However, Wolfson (p.c.) no longer maintainsthis earlieranalysis.

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME59, NUMBER 4 (1983)

that the P/HP switch does not markdifferentsections of the narrative-which as makes it crucial that we scrutinize and define explicitly the notion EVENT used by Wolfson. Wolfson 1979implies that the following are DIFFERENT EVENTS:
(a) Actions that occur in differentscenes of a story (e.g. action on shore, and then action on a boat). actors(e.g. 3rdpersonvs. 1stpersonactions). (b) The variousactionsassociatedwithdifferent (c) Actions occurringafter the expression all of a sudden. (d) The conditionsdescribedin a when clause + main clause (sometimes;see (i) below).

The following are proposed to constitute A SINGLE EVENT:

(i) The conditionsdescribedin a when clause + main clause (sometimes;see (d), above). (ii) The events describedin coordinatesentences, especiallyverbof motion + verbof saying.

Wolfson assumes that the separatingfunction of tense-switch is supportedby the fact that two out of ten occurrences of the phraseall of a sudden preceded a switch; this phrase suggests, she says, 'that somethingnew and unexpected is about to occur' (174). If all of a sudden precedes unexpected events, then it may also be said to precede dramaticevents, since what is unexpected is usually dramatic. Therefore, if all of a sudden correlates with switches from P to HP, this would supportan analysis of the HP as at least co-occurringwith dramaticevents. However, Wolfson regardsthe directionof the switch as unimportant,and gives no quantitativeinformationon this topic.'7 Of her three examples, however, two of the switches are from P to HP after the adverbial
all of a sudden.

My data contain seven occurrencesof de repente 'all of a sudden'and similar

expressions like y a esto que (e.g. im above), y en eso/esto que; and ALLSEVEN A PRECEDECHANGE INTO THEHP. However, only six of these precede a change

of subject/actoror of scene, the features which have been offered as evidence for a change in the events. Ex. 12c illustrates a switch into the HP after de
repente:
(12) a. Y mi mamd estaba lavando - unas toallas, b. entoncesfue - la - mamt empez6 a pensar, 'iPucha! La Blanca podria traer las chombas, pero como es tan chica que no tiene idea que chombas -' And my mother was washing - some towels, then she went - my - mother started to think, 'Gee! Blanca could bring the sweaters, but since she's so little and she doesn't know what sweaters -

c. Yde repentemi hermanaaparece (pres.)

en la puerta del baho

And all of a sudden my sister shows up

at the door of the bathroom

d. y le dice,
'Mamd, 6querias esto?' e. Las chombas. (V, f, 16)

and tells her,

'Mother, did you want this?' The sweaters.

What is importanthere is the fact that de repente, which introduces an unexpected or dramaticevent, co-occurs with the HP. In 12c, the sister's showing up at the door of the bathroomwith the sweaters is highly dramaticand high17Schiffrin(56) has presentedquantitativeevidence indicatingthat the directionof the switch is important,since only the switch from HP to P appearsto separateevents in the narrative.

TENSE AND ASPECT IN ORAL SPANISH NARRATIVE

771

lights the point of the story,'8 which is to show that the membersof the speaker's family possess extrasensory perceptions. Wolfson furtherclaims that the retentionof the same tense between a when clause and its head, and the absence of the HP in the when clause, result from the fact that when locates the action in time, providinga backgroundfor the events to follow; thus the two clauses constitute 'a single event.' Since when clauses are orientation clauses, it is not surprisingthat they do not provide a context for the occurrence of the HP. The weakness implicit in Wolfson's argumentbecomes apparentwhen she discusses exceptions like these (her examples 11-12):
(13) And when she came home that night, she goes to insertthe key and the door goes open. (14) When we drove up, I see all these kids ...

These, she says, result from 'the strengthof the CHP [conversationalhistorical present] alternationrule, which uses the switch in verb forms to focus attention on a new event in the story' (175). One wonders whether when clause + main clause is 'a single event', or whether the when clause is a backgroundfor (and not part of) the event. Consider the following Spanish examples:
(15) Cuando yo me di vuelta para mirarla, la Viviana ya habia llegado abajo, pues. (E, f, 34)

'When I turnedaroundto look at her, Vivianahad alreadyreachedthe first floor.'

(16) Cuando se muri6 mi tio, mi hermana chica fue y dijo ... (V, f, 16)

'When my uncle died, my youngersister went and said ...'

(17) Y cuando saliamos, que - habiamos terminado de los rosarios, me dice en el corredor

... (Mexico, p. 143) 'And when we were going out, that - we had finishedthe rosaries, she tells me in the corridor...'
(18) Y cuando volvimos, le dije ... (V, f, 16)

'And when we returned,I told him ...'

(19) Cuando nos vinimos, nos regal6 una docena de huevos a cada uno. (G, m, 51)

'When we left, she gave us each a dozen eggs.'

Recall that Wolfson identifies as different events the various actions associated with differentactors, as well as the actions that occur in differentscenes. Accordingly, we should consider the sequences of when clause + main clause as representingdifferent events in 15-19, because the subjects/actorsof the verbs are different, and in 15-16 the scenes are also different. But the tense is switched in 17, and is retained in 15, 16, 18, and 19. There is, however, a change in 15, from simple preteritin the whenclause to past perfect in the main clause. This evidence invalidatesthe proposalthat whenclauses and theirheads favor tense retention BECAUSE constitute a single event. The when clause they is not strictly an event, but the backgroundor scene of an event; hence the switch or retention of tense is, in principle, different from the phenomenon that occurs in sequences of narrativeclauses. Nevertheless, it is true that the when constructionfavors tense retention in my data (in 7/11 cases, the verbs in both clauses are in the P).'9 Furthermore,
18 See of Polanyi 1979 for a discussion of the POINT a story. 19 Schiffrin reportsthat, in 18/19Englishclauses, both verbs are in the past. The highpercentage

of verb-formretentionmay result from the lack of a morphological past imperfectin English.

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 4 (1983)

the HP rarely occurs in the when clause (once in the data); but this probably function of this type of clause. For instance, results from the backgrounding just as the HP is infrequentin orientationsections, so also is it infrequentin when clauses which give this type of information.However, HP in the when clause and tense-switch both occur when requiredby the communicationsituation, as illustratedin 15 and 17, and in
(20) Pero se asom6 a la calle la Ines y gritaba y les decia, 'dSon ustedes, son usteAnd Ines looked out into the street and shouted and said, 'Is that you, is that

des?', cuando ve (pres.) que viene la matrona. (D, f, 68)

you?', when she sees thatthe midwifeis coming.

Note furtherthat the scene and the actor here are the same-a strongindication that this should be a single event; but the tense switches from I to HP in the
when clause.20

Wolfson furtherproposes that tense retentionprevails in coordinate sentences because they form part of the same event, especially when the conjuncts include a verb of motion followed by a verb of saying. This appearsto be true for Spanish. In fact, a verb of motion which accompaniesa verb of saying often lacks its lexical meaningof movement (cf. fn. 10), and thereforedoes not constitute an event; nor is it separate from the act of saying. Consider these examples:
(21) Lleg6 y dijo ... (F, m. 70)

'He came and said ...

(22) Un dia llega la Queta y le dice ... (H, m, 33)

'One day Queta comes and tells her ...

Here the person who spoke was, at all times, at the place where the act of saying was performed. The function of the verb of movement is not clear to me; however, it is likely that it and the verb of saying are viewed by speakers as a single complex verb, in a mannersimilarto serial verb constructions, and that this holistic view motivates the use of the same tense for both forms. The tense agreementrule in Englishcoordinatesentences is apparentlymore often broken when the second sentence has an expressed subject-a fact interpretedby Wolfson to indicate differentevents. Schiffrin(53) quantifiesverbal and full-clause conjunction, and shows that verbal conjunction strongly disfavors tense-switch (4% switch in verbal conjunction vs. 22% in clausal a conjunction).However, she argues convincinglythat conjunctionis NOT necessary condition to unite acts into one event-if, by one event, we understand either 'an act which gains relevance only when the second act occurs' or actions that occur almost simultaneously. For Spanish, observe that no conjunctions occur in 23a-f (from narrative 1):
(23) a. b. c. d. ... salta un banco, salta otro, salta una fila, corre, ... he jumps a desk, jumps another, jumps a row, runs,

20 Schiffrin (52) has arguedthat, even if the whenclause + mainclause representsa singleevent, the barringof the tense-switchis not caused by this phenomenon,but by the fact that the clauses reportmaterialwhich is not sequentiallyordered.Note, however, that in Spanishthe switch may still occur in such clauses; cf. ex. 20.

TENSE AND ASPECTIN ORAL SPANISH NARRATIVE

e. va corriendo asi ... he goes running like this ...

773

f. lo pilla
g. y le dice ...

catches him
and tells him ...

The relationshipbetween tense-switchingand conjunctionin English is discussed in detail by Schiffrin. Her quantitativeanalysis shows that clausal conjunction does not inhibit tense-switching; and that even though verbal conjunction does create an inhibition,this depends not on discourse function, but on more general syntactic and semantic restrictions. Her analysis in terms of verbal and clausal conjunction cannot be extended to Spanish, however, because the two languages behave differently with respect to constraints on expression of the subject.2' Note, for instance, that Schiffrin'sexamples 1516, here numbered 24-25, have no parallel pair in Spanish, which does not allow a coreferential subject in the second conjunct in non-contrastivesituations:
(24) He suddenlyturnedaroundand punchedme.
De repente el se dio vuelta y me peg6.

(25) He suddenlyturnedaroundand he punchedme.

De repente eli se dio vuelta y *eli me peg6.

To limit the scope of the adverb to the first conjunct, Spanish would have to use another adverb in the second conjunct:
(26) De repente el se dio vuelta y {ahi, luego, entonces} me pego.

'He suddenlyturnedaroundand {there, then] (he) punchedme.'

The results of the quantificationof differenttypes of verbal conjunctionby But tense-switchtense-switching are not statistically significantin Spanish.22 OF ing is restricted when the subject is NOT expressed, REGARDLESS WHETHER
THE CLAUSES ARE CONJOINED, as shown in Table
SUBJECT EXPRESSED

1.
TOTAL

SUBJECT UNEXPRESSED

Switch

55 (36%)

63

(22%)

118

Retain
TOTAL

98

219

317
435

153 282 TABLEI. (X2 = 9.29, p < .002)

Table 1 shows that switching is favored by full as opposed to subjectless clauses. In Spanish, the expression of the subject is an indicationof some kind of topic discontinuity (Bentivoglio 1981, Silva-Corvalan1977)-and therefore a different chain of events, as illustrated below, where the tense-switch cooccurs with a change of subject referent:
(27) Levanto (pres.) la baranda, la voy (pres.)
a poner a la pared afirmdndola, y ishuh! sali6 (P) p'abajo la Viviana. (E, f, 34)

I lift up the railing,turn to lean it against

the wall, and shuh! down went Viviana.

These facts of Spanishnicely match Schiffrin'sobservationthat Englishtemporal conjunction favors tense-switching, and that 'the subject of a clause is more likely to differfrom that of the priorclause if it is precededby a temporal
21

In Silva-Corvalan 1982, I discuss these constraints. 22 Out of 105 conjoined verbal clauses, 18%contain a tense-switch(p < .58). Cf. the result of

Schiffrin(53) for English:4% (p < .001).

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 4 (1983)

conjunction'(55). Thus I propose that expression of the subjectin Spanish and temporalconjunctionin English both favor tense-switchingbecause both correlate with subject/topicdiscontinuity.Furthermore,even thoughthe relationship between switching and coordinatedsentences is statisticallynot very significant (p < .16), the raw percentages show that temporalconjunctionfavors switching over both no conjunction and coordinate conjunction (37%, 26%, 25%respectively). Even in the presence of temporalconjunctionor expressed subject, the same Spanishtense is retainedin most cases. My results, then, agreewith Schiffrin's. They also partiallysupportWolfson's hypothesis, insofaras they indicate that to tense-switching TENDS separate events; but this correlation is weak, and could not be postulated as the main function of the P/HP alternation.What is, then, the function of the HP in oral Spanish narrative?I proceed to examine the traditionalproposalthat the HP is a mechanismused to make the past more vivid. To do this, I must turn to a considerationof the structureof narratives and the role of evaluation.
THE 3. MAKING INFELICITOUS 'So WHAT?'An important component of a nar-

rative is its evaluation-the means by which the narratormakes the story interesting, highlightingthe relative importanceof the various narrativeevents. The evaluation conveys the informationthat the story is worth reportingbecause the events were dangerous, wonderful, hilarious, weird, amusing, or unusual (Labov, 371). In other words, the evaluation makes infelicitous a remark like 'So what?' by the listener. If, then, the HP occurs in the narrative clauses that report events that respond to these conditions, we may say that it has an evaluative function. Let us observe where the HP occurs in narrative1. Note that the sequence of HP forms occurs precisely in the report of the events which are unusualor hilarious, and which highlight the point of the story: you cannot cheat this teacher, because he always catches you, but he does it so nicely that you cannot help liking him. Thus the teacher's jumping desks, runningacross the room, and catching the student, as well as the student's freezing, are relayed in the HP-just as a sports commentatoruses the present tense to relay actions ocBy curringalmost simultaneouslywith their verbalization.23 using the present
23 This correlation has also been observedby Schiffrin(57), who upholdsthe traditional rhetorical functionof the EnglishHP. Partof her analysisis based on the fact that, in restrictedclauses, the HP occurs more frequentlythan the P in the progressiveform. Since the preferred readingfor the progressivewith verbs of actionincludesthe momentof speaking,the progressiveHP is interpreted as a way of presentinga past event as if it were occurringin speech time. Schiffrinquantifies restrictedclauses because this is the only context for the occurrenceof progressivesin the complicatingaction. But in Spanish,whenthe HP occursin these clauses, it is alwaysin the progressive. This must be so in order to allow the intendedmeaning-given that the non-progressivepresent action. clause with zero displacement,set in the contextof the complicating mayonly be a narrative Grantingthat Englishand Spanishdo not share identicaltense-aspect systems, it is possible that the higherfrequencyof progressiveHP in Englishresultsfroma similarsemanticconstraint,rather than from a rhetoricalreason. In any case, the HP/progressivecorrelationmay not be used to examine the expressive function of the HP in Spanish.

TENSE AND ASPECTIN ORAL SPANISH NARRATIVE

775

to describe events which occurred in the past, the speakerpresents them as if they were occurringin front of his eyes. This creates the effect of immediacy and makes the narrativemore vivid and dramatic.The HP is, then, an internal evaluation device.24 Further support for this conclusion is offered by the co-occurrence of the HP with the most climacticevent of the story, the point where the complicating action has reached a maximum and after which the narrativemoves to the result (Labov & Waletzky, 35). Examples 12 above and 28 below illustratethis co-occurrence:
(28) a. Despues, un dia - yo hago atletismo y hockey. Un dia estaba sentada - estaba la barra de salto alto aqui, yo estaba mirando pa' otro lado, b. y dije, 'Me tengo que dar vueltas porque la nina que va a saltar ahora, que tiene buzo rojo, se va a pegar con la varilla en la espalda'. c. Yme estoy (pres.) dando vuelta asi, pero iba demasiado lenta, d. y en esto la nina viene (pres.) corriendo asi, izaz!, se pega (pres.) en la espalda con la barra. e. Asi es que llegue asi a la casa pero muerta de susto. Me ha pasado dos veces este anio. (V, f, 16)

Then, one day - I do athletics and hockey. One day I was sitting - the highjump bar was here, I was looking in the opposite direction, and I said, 'I have to turnaroundbecause the girl who's going to jump now, who's wearinga red warm-upsuit, is going to hit her back againstthe bar.' And I'm turningaroundlike this, but I was going too slowly, andjust then the girl comes runninglike this, bang!, she hits her back against the bar. So I was scaredto deathwhenI got home. It's happenedto me twice this year.

Exx. 12 and 28 were told duringa conversation about premonitionsand ESP experiences. Note that, in both, the HP predictablyoccurs at the point of the climax: the sister shows up at the door with the sweaters, the girl actuallydoes what the speaker had foreseen. Both events prove the point that the narrator wants to make: that everyone in her family has extrasensoryperceptions. One narrativein the data contains only a single example of an HP form; and just as my analysis predicts, this form occurs precisely at the point of the climax:
(29) a. 'Ya', le dije, 'yo te - nos encontramos en un rato mts acd. Yo voy acd, nos encontramos.' b. Llegamos a almorzar, me acuerdo. c. Cuando llegamos a almorzar, me pasa (pres.) el papelito.25 (I: GA Gorbea o acd?) d. (Estdbamos en Grecia ya.) e. Me pasa el papelito f. y decia, 'Pregnostic6n, positivo.' (H, m,

'Okay', I told her, 'I - we'll meet here in a while. I'll come here, we'll meet.' We got home for lunch, I remember. When we got home for lunch, she hands me the little piece of paper.. (I: In Gorbeaor here?) (We were living on Grecia [Street] already.) She hands me the little piece of paper and it said, 'Pregnancytest, positive.'

33)
24

The type of evaluative materialwhich breaks the flow of narrativeclauses is defined as EX372).

TERNAL EVALUATION (Labov,

neutralized(see fn. 13). I have intuitivelytranslatedit with the Llegamos is morphologically ('get') appearspossible, thoughless probable. past ('got'); an alternativepresenttense translation

25

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME59, NUMBER 4 (1983)

This narrates the events that occurred on the day when the speaker learned that his wife was pregnant-a most importantmoment, after four years of marriagewithout children. The moment when the wife handed him the 'little piece of paper' is most dramatic,and this event is the only one in the narrative which uses the HP. Later in the conversation, the speaker told me about his child's birth. Most of the actions which occurred duringa long and nerve-rackingwaiting period are narratedin the P. Then a nurse is asked to go to the operatingroom to find out what is happening.This is the startingpoint for the most dramaticpassage:
(30) a. Entra (pres.) a ver esta cabra. b. i Y no la vimos mds! iNo la vimos mdcs! (I: dNunca mds?) 0 sea, yo, no la vi mds, pues. Si, si la vi esa noche ahi y despues no supe mds de ella, porque ya nadie la, mds la infli, y nunca mds. iDebe haber creido que eramos locos, porque no se aparecid ni por la pieza! c. Y sale (pres.), y dice (pres.)/ (I: iAh! Pero ella volvi6 a avisar.) d. (Si. Volvi6 a avisar.) e. Vuelve (pres.) a avisar, f. abre (pres.) la puerta,

g. y dice (pres.),
'Estd todo bien. Es hombre.' Ya? h. Y todos salimos corriendo de ahi. (H, m,

This girl goes in to find out. And we never saw her again!Never saw her again! (I: Never again?) That is, I never saw her again. Yes, I did see her againthat nightand then never heardof her again,because no one, no one paid any attention to her, never again. She must have thoughtthat we were crazy, because she didn't even show up aroundthe room! And she comes out, and says/ (I: Oh! But she did come back to tell you.) (Yes. She came back to tell us.) She comes back to tell us, opens the door, and says, 'Everythingis fine. It's a boy.' Okay? And we all left running.

33)

Note the detailed description of the events here-e.g. opens the door in 30f, and the skillful suspension of the action in 30b. Most of the events are coded in the HP (7/11). It is clear, then, that the HP describes the most dramatic events, those which build up the suspense which is resolved in 30g, when the birth of a baby boy is announced. In 22 of the 30 narrativesstudied, the HP co-occurs with the most dramatic events, i.e. the climactic events immediately preceding the resolution. In 5 narratives, it appears to be used randomly, and in 3, the point of the climax cannot be identified very precisely. More data may need to be analysed, but it appears that the feature shared by these last 8 narrativesis that they report events occurringover relatively long periods of time, such as illnesses or trips. By contrast, narrativesof fights, cheating at school, ESP experiences, births etc., in which the events occur in relatively shorter periods of time, show successions of sequentialevents which build up to a climax; and these events are relayed in the HP. This difference in the types of narrativesmay account for the differentconclusion drawnby Wolfson (1979:174),who states that 'the most dramaticevent is often recounted in the past tense.' But her example (And I said, 'Mister,

TENSE AND ASPECT IN ORAL SPANISH NARRATIVE

777

you're not gonna get any gas in front of me') is not quite felicitous, since what

is in the past is the reportingverb, which mighteven be unexpressed;but what was said by the speaker, in fact the most dramaticevent, is encoded in direct speech in the present.26Direct quotes are frequent in narrative;in my data, 97% (180/186) of the reporting verbs introduce such quotes. It is generally agreed that direct quotes increase the immediacyof an utterance by allowing the speaker to re-create it in its originalform, as if it were being said at speech time (Hymes 1977, Schiffrin1981,Wolfson 1978).Indirectreports,by contrast, do not create the same effect of immediacy. Thus it is the reported material itself which conveys the effect of simultaneity.Examples31-32 illustratedirect quotes without a reportingverb. Who says what is not identifiedlexically, but ratherby means of prosodyandthe context; the effect of immediacyis retained:
(31) Yfue y se acerco a la moto, iya?27 A: 'Asi es que porque eso no me gusta, yo te hago esto.' iBum! Y le empuja la moto, y se cae ipah!, y le bota la moto. Entonces, ' Te gusta eso?' B: Asi es que, 'Cuidado, te voy a sacar la mugre, eah?' A: 'iAh! (Me vai a pegar?' Entonces, 'Sabis que no te conviene, porque te sacariamos la un.'28 (L, m,

And he went and walkedtowardthe motorcycle, right? 'So because I don't like that, I do this to you'. Bum!And he pushes his motorcycle, and it falls pah!, and he drops the motorcycle. Then, 'Do you like that?' So, 'Takeit easy, I'm gonnabeat you up, eh?' 'Ah! You're gonna beat me up?' Then, 'You know you'd better not, because we'd kick your iuh.' And she said to me, 'So many sheets?' 'Yes, draft paperfor doing exercises.'

16)
(32) A: Y me dijo, ' Tantas hojas?' B: 'Si, es que para sacar ejercicios.' (T, f,

16)

Wolfson suggests that the English present tense is not equal to present time, but is more accurately a 'timeless' form, as proposed by Twaddell(quoted by Wolfson, 180). Similarly,Bull (86) proposes that the Spanishpresentis 'a tenseless form'; but he adds that the function of all verbal forms is in fact given by the context. Thus the HP does not have the meaningof past. We infer that it refers to past events, because of the context in which it occurs; but its meaning remainsthat of includingthe momentof speaking. Furthermore, certainspeech events (e.g. sportscasts, descriptions of events in a ceremony) are encoded in the present, and refer to actions which occur simultaneouslywith the moment of speaking. In addition, the present in Spanish, as in other Romance lanand (p.c.) disagreeswith my analysis;she believes that what is most important dramaticis thatthe speakerstandsup to the othermanandSAYS something.I wouldpointout, however, that a change in the content of what the speaker says changes the illocutionaryeffect of the act:
And I said, 'Mister, are you standing in line to get gas?' 27 The capital letters 'A' and 'B' are used to indicate the turnsof each speakerin the reported 26 Wolfson

conversation. 28 The narrator edits the direct quote and uses a noise (uh), instead of the tabu word which I assume was actually said.

778

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 4 (1983)

guages,29may refer to on-going action at the moment of speaking:

(33) A: iQue estudias, Rodrigo?
B: Estudio historia.

What{do you study, are you studying},

Rod? I {study, am studying} history.

This is evidence that the present is not necessarily a timeless form. Indeed, the present, in all its uses, either relates events to the moment of speaking,or refers to events which are true at all times, includingthe moment of speaking. Used in the context of the narrativeclauses to reportpast events, the present brings those events from the past and presents them as if they were occurring simultaneouslywith speech time. This internalevaluationfunction of the HP is supported by the quantitativeand qualitativeanalysis of the narrativesincluded in this study. 4. CONCLUSION. distributionof tense and aspect in oral Spanish narThe rative shows that the meaningof the forms is, in part,delimitedby the narrative context in which they occur. Thus the P and the I share the meaning of anteriority; but in the context of the orientation, only the I may be marked by cating action section, however, the I does not indicate habitualness(a possible readingin other contexts), and the present acquiresperfective aspect; i.e., like the P, it encodes sequential events with temporaljuncture. The quantitativeand qualitativeevidence presented here indicates that the HP functions as an internalevaluationdevice. I have tested two partiallycontradictoryanalyses of English narrativeagainst the Spanish data; and I have shown that, for Spanish, the function of the switch between P and HP is not that of separatingevents. Rather, the switch may be considered to set off one or more events-those which representthe most climacticmoments-from the rest of the narrativeclauses. This co-occurrencewith climacticevents indicates that the HP is an internalevaluation mechanism,a conclusion which supports Schiffrin's similar claim for English. This cross-linguistic evidence suggests that we may eventually be able to develop a universalcharacterizationof the discourse propertiesof temporaland aspectual elements in naturallanguage. Bull (82) has said that
'forms do not, in a literal sense, perform functions. They have, rather, certain combinatory

OF EVENTS. the compliIn (i.e. may refer to) the feature TIME THENARRATIVE

potentialswhich make them uniquewithin the total set of forms in the tense system. Whatis calleda formfunctionis actuallythe productof the interaction the formandthe otherfactors of involved in the communication,that is, the systems combiningwith the form and the active of participation the hearer.'

Thus we may conclude that the HP does not, in itself, have a rhetoricalfunction. Rather,the context of the narrativein which it is embedded,and its interaction with linguistic and extralinguisticfactors, draw out forcefully that aspect of the present form which includes the momentof speaking,presentingthe events as if they were occurringbefore us. Of the total set of forms in the tense system of Spanish, only the present tense can achieve this effect.
29

And also in English expressions of the type Here I come or There she goes.

TENSEAND ASPECT ORAL IN SPANISH NARRATIVE REFERENCES

779

ALCINA BLECUA.1980. Gramatica espafiola. BarceFRANCH, JUAN, and JosE MANUEL

lona: Ariel.

and RUFINO J. BELLO, ANDRES,

BENTIVOGLIO, PAOLA.

CUERVO.

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