Tempus

A foundational book by one of the most distinguished German humanists of the last half century, Tempus joins cultural linguistics and literary interpretation at the hip. Developing two controversial theses—that sentences are not truly meaningful in isolation from their contexts and that verb tenses are primarily indicators not of time but of the attitude of the speaker or writer— Tempus surveys a dazzling array of ancient and modern texts from famous authors as well as casual speakers of German,