Tempus: The World of Discussion and the World of Narration

Tempus is a groundbreaking book by a distinguished German humanist that explores the relationship between language and culture, challenging traditional notions of meaning and time. It surveys a wide range of ancient and modern texts and establishes a unique career focused on text linguistics and cultural outreach.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 06 February 2024
Publisher: Fordham University Press

A seminal work by one of the most renowned German humanists of the latter half of the 20th century, Tempus seamlessly blends cultural linguistics and literary interpretation. Through the development of two contentious theses—namely, that sentences cannot hold true meaning in isolation from their contexts and that verb tenses primarily serve as indicators of the speaker's or writer's attitude rather than solely reflecting the passage of time—Tempus conducts a comprehensive survey of a diverse range of ancient and contemporary texts, encompassing works by renowned authors as well as everyday German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and English speakers. The book concludes with a final chapter that extends these observations to Greek, Russian, and world languages.

A timeless masterpiece in German and widely accessible in numerous other languages, Tempus pioneered a groundbreaking field of study, text linguistics, and carved out a distinctive professional path characterized by meticulous observation, empathetic cultural engagement, and practical involvement with the challenges faced by migrants. Weinrich's meticulous and lucid interpretations of renowned and lesser-known authors from all the major languages of Western Europe broaden our literary horizons and provoke a reevaluation of our linguistic comprehension.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781531503345