The year is 1066 and William, Duke of Normandy, invades England to claim the throne he believes to be rightly his. Meanwhile King Harold Godwinson rushes to Hastings to do battle with William after defeating the Norwegian army of Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge.
This is an example of the historical or historic present, which involves using the present tense to talk about past events. It is also known as the dramatic present or narrative present. I’ve noticed its use in a number of documentaries I watched recently. It also appears in novels, such as Charles Dicken’s David Copperfield, and Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, is written entirely in the historical present. It sounds rather strange to me. Does it sound strange to you?
Hi
I’ve always thought it sounded very strange but it doesn’t sound as strange in a historical documentary when they are presenting it as re-enactment. I suppose because the whole lot of events have been transported into the present by the actors.
In telly dramas I’ve sometimes heard women using it ‘… and she says to me and I think … ‘, but I’ve never heard people use it in live conversation – mebbe’s it’s a dialect thing.
Ned
In Polish this is used all the time, particularly in casual speech but also in literature e.g. epic poetry.
from what I read of mongolian grammar, they have a specific tense for narrative present, separate from the normal present tense, for story telling.
It sounds a lot more natural to me in Spanish than it does in English, though, as noted above, in some registers in English it’s pretty common, e.g. “then he comes in an says …..”
An aunt of mine used it whenever she narrated. But in addition she used the inverted verb form “says I”; e.g. “I’m standing there and she asks where I’m going on holiday”, “Bournemouth” says I.
It was interesting when I learnt French to find the same inversion used.
Another marker for historical present is using “like” instead of “says”: “And then he’s like, ‘why not?'”. This exists in other languages, too.
Also in Russian, in colloquial historical present, future can be used for emphasis: “А он как даст кулаком по столу!” – literally: “And he how will slam his fist on the table”.
It seems to me that the use of “narrative present” or “historic present” is a choice of narrator to make the story more dramatic (either in a historical documentary or just a casual story told to a friend). It would be interesting also to find out if there are any languages that grammatically do not allow the narrator to do that.
This holds for Polish as well, though it’s typically either poetic or explicitly marked like above (jak nie walnie pięścią w stół! literally ‘how [s/he] won’t slam with fist into table’ but the meaning is positive, s/he did slam).
Perhaps if it weren’t for the classical grammarian tradition rooted in Latin and Greek, we’d talk about non-past perfective and non-past imperfective in Slavic (or even ‘basic perfective’, ‘basic imperfective’) as the simple future and present forms are often clearly parallel both in form and in use, except that the simple future ones lack the present continuous meaning due to their perfectivity.
The historical present is an affectation adopted pretty recently by academics -like the way academics now begin every exposition with ‘so’. Excessively irritating. In fiction it is a device used to heighten realism.
Actually I’ve never thought about it. The style of speech is not strange to me; I’ve encountered it many times, but I’ve never had an analytical thought about it. However, this is not strange on the languages platform. In Turkish, as far as I remember, stories (specially fantasy) and jokes, are told using a specific tense (I think called the indefinite past tense), in which verbs mostly end in (-m(V)ş) – (V) is a vowel corresponding to the general vowels’ harmony rule.
It’s very common in French and has been for a long time, so far as I know. In English, John Humphries recently had a go at people for using the tense on the radio.