Studien zum System und Gebrauch der "Tempora" in der Sprache Chaucers und Gowers.
- Author/Editor
- Bauer, Gero.
- Title
- Studien zum System und Gebrauch der "Tempora" in der Sprache Chaucers und Gowers.
- Published
- Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1970.
- Review
- Beginning with the relations (and differences) between chronological time and verb tense, Bauer's "tudien" categorizes the general deployment of the latter in the works of Chaucer and Gower. The approach is thoroughly structural (rather than even generative) and focuses on fundamental oppositions: the present tense as opposed to the preterit and both as opposed to the perfect. For Gower, Bauer draws on the CA--which is as much to say as he does not comparatively analyze the poet's Latin and French syntax. The Chaucer examples largely come from the CT, TC, "Legend of Good Women," and "Book of the Duchess." Bauer's focus is very localized--generally at the clause level, rarely at the sentence level, and never at the level of an utterance or narrative. While "Studien" make occasional nods to English syntactic history, Chaucer's and Gower's usages are very much treated in isolation, with no claims for larger significances in English language history or syntactic study. In this way, Bauer demonstrates the flexibility of tense usage by Chaucer and Gower, both of whom are fond of the "historical present." He equally shows the syntactic (and hence semantic) significance of a variety of common conjunctions: "er," "whilom," "since," "tofore," etc. As a structuralist, Bauer sees tense usage above all as expressing a point of reference: when, temporally, can one action be situated in relation to another? If an action is narrated in the preterit, then, a prior action will occur in the perfect. In this, of course, Chaucer's and Gower's language--Middle English in general--is much the same as Present Day English, with the very significant exception that usage studies of the latter are more capacious in the kinds of data they use. The point-of-reference distinctions may hold with English creoles or non-standard varieties, for example, but the lexis and syntax used to express them differs considerably from those of Standard English. [TWM. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 1970
- Gower Subjects
- Language and Word Studies
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification