Computing perspective: the pluperfect in Dutch
Leonoor Oversteegen, B. Bekker · Linguistics · 2002
The proposal by linguists and narratologists that the pluperfect may be used to introduce perspective has not been founded in the (formal) semantics of tense and aspect. Neither has it been related to precise contextual conditions. In order to make a start in overcoming these shortcomings, the perspectivizing function of the pluperfect has been defined in terms of temporal semantic information and contextual properties. On the basis of the theoretical model a method has been developed to compute perspective as introduced by a pluperfect for two different text types: narratives and news reports. The validity of this method has been tested on a corpus of text fragments originating from newspapers and novels.