A Corpus Stylistics Approach to Contemporary Present-tense Narrative

Present-tense narrative has often been discussed as a technique that construes a narrative sphere different from that created by past-tense narrative. Such discussions have tended to focus on the relationship between the narrating and narrated time, or whether the narrative tense is used as a deictic or a-deictic marker of time in narrative, as the title of Casparis’ seminal work Tense without Time (1975) shows. Acknowledging the diverse nature of the use of the narrative present tense, many stu