Description: Tempus studies tense uses, ancient and modern, in great literature and everyday life and in all the major languages of western Europe. The book lays the foundation for the discipline of text linguistics as well as being a masterwork of literary criticism in the tradition of Curtius, Auerbach, and Spitzer.
Brief description: Harald Weinrich (1927-2022), after holding professorships in Romance philology and in linguistics at several universities, was founding chair of the Department of German as a Foreign Language at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and, following his retirement in 1992, for six years held the Chair of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Collège de France. Among his many books on literature, linguistics, French and German grammar, language pedagogy, and the sociology of cultures, three have previously been translated into English: The Linguistics of Lying and Other Essays (Washington, 2012), On Borrowed Time: The Art and Economy of Living with Deadlines (Chicago, 2008), and Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (Cornell, 2004).
Review Quotes: Harald Weinrich's classic book, long overdue for English translation, offers a groundbreaking study of time and tense. Arguing that tenses indicate not time in itself but the speaker's relation to the utterance, Weinrich distinguishes narrative tenses from tenses of speech or commentary and explores the different ways in which they function in various European languages and works of literature.---Jonathan Culler, author of Theory of the Lyric