"Storytelling is a universal human activity and oral narration - particularly modern 'conversational' narration such as anecdotes or personal stories - has long been fertile ground for linguists working on tense usage across a variety of languages. This book introduces 'performed' oral storytelling into the debate, using data from traditional and contemporary storytellers in French to explore the narrative tenses attested, the discourse-pragmatic effects of tense switching, the structures deployed at points of temporal sequence, as well as broader questions concerning the nature of oral discourse."

Janice Carruthers

Introduction 1. Theoretical and Methodological Preliminaries 2. The Narrative Line: Models, Patterns, Systems 3. Tense-Switching on the Narrative Line 4. Structures between Narrative Clauses 5. Conclusions and Further Questions