How to manipulate tenses to express a characters point of view

Abstract

This study treats the crucial concept of point of view (henceforth PoV) as comprising three major but distinct sub-types -communicative PoV (the here-and-now of encoder or decoder), experiencer's point of view, or narrative point of view- but with the proviso that the first of these can in fact be subsumed under the third. The sub-types can be distinguished by close attention to their contrasting use of a variety of special mechanisms or devices that are inherent in the English tense system. Of considerable interest are projections of experiencer's PoV. Consider, for example, someone who says Yesterday she had to speak French with a client who couldn't understand English. By using past tense couldn't, that encoder has adopted the French-speaking woman's experiential viewpoint at the time when the reported situation transpired, rather than remaining confined to their own communicative PoV. The third kind of PoV, narrative PoV, generally what is meant by PoV in literary studies, has to do with the questions Who's the narrator? and Whose Exp-PoV is assumed by the narrator?.