Abstract

Narrative discourse is composed of two kind of clauses: foreground and background clauses. Foreground clauses convey the temporal reference point of the narrative, whereas background clauses do not. This pragmatic-discoursal function is possible because foreground clauses denote discrete situations, whereas background clauses denote homogeneous situations. Only discrete situations can have a distinct temporal reference point. To the extent the same event in the world can be presented as a homogeneous or discrete situation in discourse, this distinction has a cognitive, not referential, nature. In this work, I review different linguistic procedures for constructing homogeneous and discrete situations, and for mappings from one type to the other: lexical choice, the opposition between perfective and imperfect aspect, verbal periphrases, and aspectual coercion. This review supports the idea that the distinction between homogeneous and discrete situations resides within a level of conceptualization, related to the lexico-grammatical system.