Chapter 9

Comparisons of narration in PREST and PAST

This chapter investigates how narrative tenses affect the way a narrator tells a story by comparing N-segments in PREST and PAST quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative data for narration in the two corpora show that the amount of narration tends to be smaller in present-tense narrative. We will start with comparing formal aspects of narration in present- and past-tense narratives. Narratologists acknowledge that the use of the present tense for narration has a greater impact on 1st-person narrative than 3rd-person narrative. This directed us to compare 1st-person narration in PREST and PAST by focusing on frequently used collocations in the two corpora. Our comparison reveals how the narrator’s viewpoint is reflected differently in present-tense and past-tense narratives. After that, we will concentrate on frequent cases of 1st-person present-tense narration which involve ambiguity between whether the segment is narration or character thought presented in a free direct form. These cases are annotated with a portmanteau tag as N-FDT, which is almost unique to PREST because this portmanteau tag is rarely found in PAST. The cases of N-FDT in PREST reveal how ambiguity between N and FDT is exploited in present-tense 1st-person narrative. In the final two sections, we will discuss the representation of character perception as one of the most important elements of narration and show how immediate in effect it can be when represented in present-tense. In the context of present-tense narration, even a character’s actions can be narrated while being filtered through the character’s internal perception, as opposed to being depicted externally by the narrator.