A feature of performed narrative: the conversational historical present

Abstract

The historical present, the use of the present tense to refer to past events, is a feature of narrative which has long been recognized. The object of this analysis is the use of the historical present tense specifically in narratives which occur in everyday conversational interactions. This usage will be referred to as the conversational historical present to distinguish it from the use of this tense in other genres such as travelogues and jokes. In the analysis of the occurrence of the conversational historical present, it was found that features of the relationship between the speaker and the audience had a strong influence. This is true not because the use of the linguistic feature itself is socially stratified, but rather because it functions as one of a set of features which appear in a specific type of narrative and is therefore governed by norms of interaction which constrain the social behavior involved in the recounting of such narratives. The fact that the use of the conversational historical present is an interactional variable in this respect has had important theoretical and methodological implications for the analysis which is reported here. The basic theoretical point is that in the study of the conversational historical present one sees a perfect example of the relationship between linguistic structure and language use.