The western European present perfect is subject to substantial crosslinguistic variation. The literature, however, focuses on individual languages or on comparisons of a restricted number of languages. We piece together the puzzle and do so in a data-driven way by comparing the use of the present perfect through a parallel corpus based on the French novel L’Étranger and its translations in Italian, German, Dutch, European Spanish, British English, and Modern Greek. We introduce and showcase Translation Mining, a software suite combining a parallel corpus database with annotation and analysis tools. Translation Mining allows us to generate descriptive statistics of tense use across languages but also to visualize variation through its multidimensional scaling component and to link the variation we find to the underlying data through its integrated setup. We confirm that the present perfect competes with the past and we reveal the fine-grained scalar nature of the variation. To complete the puzzle, we ascertain the dimensions of variation, ranging from lexical and compositional semantics to dynamic semantics and pragmatics.1

Drawing upon research on narrative and speech styles and on digital and multimodal communication, the author proposes multimodal narrative discourse analysis (MNDA) with associated pedagogical and analytical procedures to teach and study storytelling. The second language (L2) students first participated in multimodal narrative simulations in the virtual world of Second Life. The university students then presented, evaluated, and revised stories in both face-to-face and digital contexts through multiple modalities and technologies. MNDA further provided tools and methods for analyzing the students’ discursive processes and agentive experiences of L2 storytelling. The results of MNDA showed that the proper use of narrative elements, discourse structures, and stylistic devices, as well as bodily, visual, and video resources, assisted the students in developing multimodal designs and storytelling styles. This technology-mediated discourse approach to L2 storytelling suggests the importance of teaching and researching broader narrative contexts and activities other than simply elocution in multimodal communicative activities.

This paper proposes an updated analysis of the uses of now to modify past-tense clauses in narratives. It is by now well known that indexical expressions such as now are not as rigid as previously thought and can shift in some contexts (e.g. a literary style like Free Indirect Discourse in English or under report verbs in some languages). What is interesting about shifted now is that its distribution is much broader than these limited contexts. The conditions under which it can shift, however, are unclear and still under debate. Many recent proposals have tried to derive this property from the lexical meaning of now, thus treating it as a special case. Unlike previous analyses, I argue that the temporal perspective shift and temporal relations are functions of narrative discourse itself rather than the lexical semantics of now. The lexical meaning of now, I contend, is that it refers to a contextually salient time, regardless of whether it derives from actual speech context or discourse context. In addition, now invariably indicates a change of state, denoting the turning point dividing the past and the future seen from this contextually salient time. My claim is based on a quantitative study of naturally occurring narrative examples from the British National Corpus, and formalized in the discourse-level formal framework of Discourse Representation Theory.

This paper discusses how point of view (POV) is expressed in British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English narrative discourse. Spoken languages can mark changes in POV using strategies such as direct/indirect discourse, whereas signed languages can mark changes in POV in a unique way using “role shift”. Role shift is where the signer “becomes” a referent by taking on attributes of that referent, e.g. facial expression. In this study, two native BSL users and two native British English speakers were asked to tell the story “The Tortoise and the Hare”. The data were then compared to see how point of view is expressed and maintained in both languages. The results indicated that the spoken English users preferred the narrator's perspective, whereas the BSL users preferred a character's perspective. This suggests that spoken and signed language users may structure stories in different ways. However, some co-speech gestures and facial expressions used in the spoken English stories to denote characters' thoughts and feelings bear resemblance to the hand movements and facial expressions used by the BSL storytellers. This suggests that while approaches to storytelling may differ, both languages share some gestural resources which manifest themselves in different ways across different modalities.