The Historical Present in Modern Greek Narratives: a discourse-pragmatic approach

This paper, based on the analysis of a corpus of Greek oral personal narratives, discusses the discourse functions, co-occurrences with other devices and contexts of the Historical Present (HP), in comparison to findings of the relevant literature on English narratives. Most commonly, the switch to HP occurs at the turn to the climax (peak) of climactic (classic) narratives (Labov 1972, Peterson McCabe 1983); it subsequently covers the part up to the beginning of the resolution, except for cases of background and evaluative commentary or resultant states and actions. Frequently, rapid switches to HP also mark the passage to the Complicating Action (CA) or to any new narrative section within the CA; these typically co-occur with linguistic signals of topic discontinuity/change of event-schema, and are not only confined to climactic narratives. The discussion aims at showing two things: a) Any switches to HP in narratives cannot be fully accounted for, without reference to the forms of the narratives examined and to various contextual parameters (in our case: the audience variable), b) The evaluative and event-separating functions of HP presented in the recent literature as mutually exclusive possibilities, are but two aspects of the same phenomenon: the establishment of a "point of view"