Scenic Narrative and the Mimetic Present

Cambridge University Press eBooks, pp. 66–146

Abstract

The use of the present tense to refer to the past in scenic narrative, that is, narrative passages where discourse time comes close to story time, depends on the pretense that the past events are being currently re-enacted. This pretense is facilitated by a mimetic style of narrating: the narrative is construed in such a way that the activity of processing the narrative is similar to the processing of actual experience. This is achieved in three ways. First, by narrating events that are concrete and appeal to our sensorimotor faculties. Second, by depicting the narrative events through gesture, direct speech representation, sound symbolism, and other means. Third, by using simple grammar to mimic the immediacy of actual experience. Moreover, the present tense is more likely to be used when the narrated events are high in communicative dynamism, which means that they are particularly newsworthy or important for the development of the discourse.

Authors 1

1. Arjan A. Nijk corresponding Aachen Rijksuniversiteit Leiden

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, The Netherlands