Tense Sequence in Procedural Discourse

Abstract

When a person begins to speak, he makes a series of choices which influence the structure of what he says not just in his first sentence but right through till the last sentence of his discourse. Some of these choices might be labelled as style choices but style choices are also linguistic, and need to be accounted for in an adequate linguistic description. Formerly it was fashionable to relegate some problems into the field of semantics where they could be conveniently left since semantics, if it was a non-linguistic field, was outside of the realm of the legitimate investigation of the linguist, and if it really was a valid part of linguistic investigation it was such an undeveloped field that no one expected you to begin to account for these problems anyway. Let us not relegate problems of style to the same nether world of decreased linguistic responsibility. Elsewhere in this volume, Professor Ordoñez reviews some attempts that have been made in recent years to handle some problems of style with a linguistics model. In this paper I will discuss some problems of style from a tagmemics viewpoint.