地の文での状態表現のテンス形式の使用様相 ―明治期と戦後の3人称小説を対象として―

Abstract

This paper examines the tense forms of stative expressions that appear in texts from the Meiji period and the postwar period. As a result of the analysis, first, it was confirmed that in Meiji period novels, there are more expressions of state in the present tense teiru than in postwar novels. On the other hand, in post-war novels written on narrative discourse, there is a far greater proportion of state expressions using the past tense teita. Specifically, during the Meiji period (particularly during the early period of unification of the written and spoken forms of a language), it was common to use the present tense to describe the observed state as it was, whether from the speaker's perspective or the character's perspective. In contrast, in postwar novels, the method of storytelling is relatively fixed, and the past tense teita, which is the leading tense of the story, appears prominently in the expression of the state told from the narrator's perspective. In summary, with the establishment of modern written language, we became conscious of the character's point of view in the way we spoke, and although the state expressions of all local sentences did not become past tense teita, after the war, It has become clear that the use of the present tense teiru in sentences of the narrative discourse has become limited.