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Stylistic Use of the Grammatical Tense Category in the Middle English Prose

Paper · 2022 · Yuliya P. Vyshenskaya

Summary

The article asks how the verbal category of tense was used for stylistic effect in late medieval English prose. This was a period when prose became an independent literary form, separate from poetry. In England this shift came about a century later than on the Continent. The author argues that writers of the time judged good style by how closely it matched an "etalon", or model. For English, the models were classical rhetoric and, because English romance was largely derivative, French rhetorical practice. Tense is chosen as the object of study because it spans the whole text and depends heavily on content and composition. The text's time continuum is treated as a set of distinct temporal planes, each signalled by tense forms. The material is English prose versions of courtly chivalric romance, for example Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and Caxton-era translations. The study is qualitative, not computational. It concludes that English tense and modality were still taking shape. Writers therefore could not fully adopt the continental stylistic canons, and this pushed them to develop their own stylistic solutions.

Key points

  • The illustrative corpus consists of English courtly romance prose: Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, the prose history of Aymon's four sons, Paris and Vienne, and the Melusine tradition (Jean d'Arras). Every text comes from an archive.org edition.
  • English prose reworkings of verse works date from the 14th century, roughly one hundred years after similar continental developments.
  • Shifts between past and present tense (Present Historicum) are not governed by rules. Following L.G. Stepanova, the author reads them as a merger of the historical and the discourse planes.
  • The work draws on Benveniste's split between historical narration and discourse, noting that it does not map simply onto written versus oral language.
  • Tense profiles of works from about the same period show similar features. Tense can therefore serve as a marker of stylistic kinship between texts.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A text's timeline can be modelled as several separable temporal planes, each tied to particular tense forms, instead of one flat sequence. This helps systems decide which events belong to the same narrative layer.
  • I2. An unexpected switch to present tense inside a past narrative may signal a change of perspective (narration blending into discourse), not a real change in time.
  • I3. Benveniste's opposition between historical narration (impersonal, past) and discourse (speaker-anchored, present) separates the narrator's voice from characters' speech.
  • I4. Tense-usage profiles can work as a stylistic fingerprint showing kinship between texts from the same period.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): event ordering could first assign each clause to a temporal plane based on tense, then order events within and across planes.
  • I2 (world): the timeline builder should treat a historical present as past-time narration and keep the event in story order, flagging the switch only as a stylistic plane marker.
  • I3 (frames): speech-act and quotation handling could tag clauses as narration or discourse, so that "now" and "I" are anchored to the right speaker.
  • I4 (learn): tense-distribution statistics per document could act as a cheap sanity check that silver data from a new genre resembles the training material before it is mixed in.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Herzen University.

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksClassics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Yuliya P. Vyshenskaya. 2022. Stylistic Use of the Grammatical Tense Category in the Middle English Prose. RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics 13.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.22363/2313-2299-2022-13-2-416-432

@article{vyshenskaya2022stylistic,
  title = {{Stylistic Use of the Grammatical Tense Category in the Middle English Prose}},
  author = {Yuliya P. Vyshenskaya},
  journal = {RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics 13},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.22363/2313-2299-2022-13-2-416-432},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.22363/2313-2299-2022-13-2-416-432}
}

References

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