In linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and rhetoric

Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...

, the historical present (also called dramatic present or narrative present) refers to the employment of the present tense

Present tense

The present tense is a grammatical tense that locates a situation or event in present time. This linguistic definition refers to a concept that indicates a feature of the meaning of a verb...

 when narrating past events. Besides its use in writing about history, especially in historical chronicles (listing a series of events), it is used in fiction, for 'hot news' (as in headlines), and in everyday conversation (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 129-131). In conversation, it is particularly common with 'verbs of communication' such as tell, write, and say (and in colloquial uses, go) (Leech 2002: 7).

Literary critics and grammarians have said that the historical present has the effect of making past events more vivid. More recently, analysts of its use in conversation have argued that it functions, not by making an event present, but by marking segments of a narrative, foregrounding

Foregrounding

Foregrounding is the practice of making something stand out from the surrounding words or images. It is “the ‘throwing into relief’ of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of ordinary language.” The term was first associated with Paul Garvin in the 1960s, who used it as a...

 events (that is, signalling that one event is particularly important, relevant to others) and marking a shift to evaluation (Brinton 1992: 221).

Examples

In an excerpt from Dickens' David Copperfield

David Copperfield (novel)

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery , commonly referred to as David Copperfield, is the eighth novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a novel in 1850. Like most of his works, it originally appeared in serial...

, we can see the shift from the past tense

Past tense

The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...

 to the historical present gives the sense of immediacy, as of a recurring vision:

In describing fiction

Summaries of the narratives (plots) of works of fiction are conventionally presented using the present tense rather than the past tense. At any particular point of the story, as it unfolds, there is a now, and hence a past and a future, so whether some event mentioned in the story is past, present, or, future changes as the story progresses; the entire plot description is presented as if the story's now is a continuous present. Thus, in summarizing the plot of A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it ranks among the most famous works in the history of fictional literature....

, one may write:

"Manette is obsessed with making shoes, a trade he learned while in prison."

Further reading

• *Brinton, L. J. (1992). "The historical present in Charlotte Bronte's novels: Some discourse functions." Style 26(2): 221-244.
• *Huddleston, R. and G. K. Pullum (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521431468
• *Leech, G. N. (1971). Meaning and the English Verb, London: Longman. . ISBN 0-582-52214-5