The Role of Finiteness in Narratives

The article discusses the role of finiteness in sentence structure and its implications for their interpretation of narratives. Finite, infinite, and semi-finite sentence structures are analysed with regard to their ability to speak ‘about’ something. Only finite constructions allow this. The inflectional morphological markers of finiteness and their interpretation are examined in detail. For German, the inflectional morphemes -t for tense and -e for mood are identified. Their properties are summarised as abstract features for tense [±t] and mood [±e]. These two features constitute the central properties of the grammatical category ‘finiteness’: they allow the separation of the speech situation and the event situation to be expressed. If finiteness is fronted (via verb movement), it anchors the expressed proposition in a possible world at some time without dependence on matrix structures. These properties are used to derive central aspects of narratives with the help of regular grammatical devices. In a first step, these are applied to narratives in the preterite, so that – analogous to indirect speech – a narrator can be established for fictional narratives. For the morphologically unmarked present tense, an interpretation of the grammatical properties is proposed with reference to the available contexts, systematically relating central aspects of present tense narratives to the properties of finiteness.