Functions and Points of View of Historical Present in Experiential Narratives

Abstract

In studies of Japanese tense, the functions of Historical Present (hereafter HP), which expresses past events and situations with a present tense form, have been examined mainly based on written data such as novels, and they have been considered to be different from those of English HP. Recent study, analyzing Japanese oral data, suggests a point-of-view hypothesis in which the past tense form expresses the narrator's point of view in the storytelling world and HP expresses a character's point of view in the storyworld. However, such binary understanding of point-of-view can explain neither why narrators shift the point of view nor the multiplicity of the functions of HP.

Thus, this study qualitatively and quantitatively analyzes 44 Japanese experiential narratives using a Labovian model for oral narrative analysis. As a result, it turns out that: 1) Japanese HP in experiential narratives appears in background clauses as well as narrative clauses that form the storyline of narratives; 2) HP shows a point of view in the storyworld, but does not specify whose point of view it is; and 3) the use of HP is triggered by a character's uncontrollable perceptual experience or a character's actual movement, by which it has different functions such as evaluative function and text organizing function.