Suzanne Fleischman (1948–2000) was Professor of French and Romance Philology at the University of California.

• AbbreviationsPrefaceIntroductionChapter 1. Working Definitions and Operational Preliminaries 1.1. Tense1.2. Aspect1.3. Situation types1.4. Grammar, discourse, and the meaning of tense-aspect categories1.5. Tenses of the past system1.6. Tenses of the present system1.7. Tense-aspect in early RomanceChapter 2. A Theory of Tense-Aspect in Narrative Based on Markedness 2.1. The concept of markedness2.2. Markedness and tense-aspect categories in narrativeChapter 3. “Ungrammatical” Tenses: Background of the Question 3.1. Scope of the phenomenon3.2. Diegetic and mimetic discourse3.3. Grammatical “freedom” of the early vernaculars3.4. Tense alternation as a mark of “literary” Écritures3.5. Prosodic considerations3.6. Aspectual hypotheses and “situation types”3.7. The HISTORICAL PRESENT: The “past-more-vivid”3.8. The NARRATIVE PRESENT, HISTORICAL PRESENT, and PRESENT tense3.9. Participant tracking3.10. From oral performance to Écriture: Oral residue in written texts3.11. Performed stories: Medieval and modern, natural and artificialChapter 4. Narrative Discourse: Typological Considerations 4.1. Verbal representations of experience: Story structure and reality structure4.2. Differentia specifica of narrative textuality4.3. Stories, narratives, and other verbalizations of experience4.4. Narrative fiction4.5. Modes of discourse: “Storytelling” and “communication”4.6. Linguistic marks of storytelling4.7. Tense and aspect as metalinguistic signals of narrative genresChapter 5. The Linguistic Structure of Narrative Part I. Temporal Structure 5.1. Speaker-now and story-now5.2. Retrospective discourse and prospective time5.3. Iconic sequence and the narrative normPart II. Text Structure 5.4. The global structure of narrative5.5. Evaluation5.6. Adapting the natural narrative model to complex narrations5.7. The clausal structure of narrative5.8. ConclusionChapter 6. Textual Functions Part I. Grounding: The “Texture” of the Text 6.1. The foreground-background contrast6.2. Toward a theory of grounding6.3. Grounding and parataxis6.4. Tense-aspect and grounding6.5. Creating cohesion: The chansons de gestePart II. Boundary Marking: The “Space” of the Text 6.6. Tense switching and the segmentation of narrative textsPart III. Information Blocking: The “Tempo” of the Text 6.7. “Co-subordinate” nexus6.8. Pacing the discourseChapter 7. Expressive Functions 7.1. Point of view and focalization7.2. The Speaker and the experiencer7.3. Free indirect discourse7.4. Interior monologue7.5. Tense, temporality, and focalization7.6. Time, tense, and memory in Proust7.7. Point of view and the PERFECT7.8. Tense-aspect and point of view in natural narration7.9. ConclusionChapter 8. Metalinguistic Functions: Storytelling in the PRESENT 8.1. Epic storytelling: Narration without time8.2. Romancero: The fragmenting of narrative8.3. The HISTORICAL PRESENT and beyond8.4. Transformations of narration in the nouveau roman8.5. PRESENT-tense fiction: Where is it moving?ConclusionAppendix 1. Coding ConventionsAppendix 2. TextsNotesReferencesI. Texts CitedII. Critical WorksConcept and Name IndexIndex of Texts Cited

...Fleischman’s book takes the study of medieval literature to new hermeneutic horizons.... Furthermore, through the use of sociolinguistics she connects the modern and medieval worlds in a way that will make the medieval world less alien to us, and thus her perspective gives us another means by which we can make medieval literature more relevant to our students. (Studies in the Age of Chaucer)