Le soir meme… l’imparfait defocalisait (The same evening ... the imperfect defocused)

Abstract

Narrative uses of the French imperfect tense (imparfait) have been subjected to multiple analyses, including the one by Berthonneau and Kleiber. We will start from a concrete example, i.e., Maupassant’s celebrated “Le soir même, il était son amant” (‘That very evening, he was her lover’), summarise the most important scholarly literature on the subject, then show the relevance of an interlocutional approach based on the notions of defocalisation and focalisation. A series of other authentic sequences of the type Le soir même, il + imparfait, embedded in their original contexts, will subsequently be envisaged in an attempt to continue to illustrate this approach, which places the interlocutor back in the centre of the communicative act, and to examine the defocalising properties of the imparfaits that precede and/or follow. Show more