Time analysis

Like in all the texts, there are two different types of time. One of them is the external or historical time, and the other is the internal or narrative time.

• External or historical time: is the time in which the action takes place, the period in which all happens.

Inside this type of time we find out that there is not an specific epoch of time in which things are happening but they are taking place all together, no matter if one page was telling us the past or whether it shows the present. We can say that time is not clear, but I think that the period could be our century or maybe the final of the 20^th.

• Internal or narrative time: is the time the action lasts.

Like in the other example of time, this isn’t clear too, because the story mixes past and present and we are not able to say how time have passed, because it is happening now, the writer is telling it now, but he tells things about the past.

Although it is not clear enough I would dare to say that the time happens maybe in 25 years, because we don’t know how old the principal character is, but we do believe that now he is an adult and years ago he was a child, because he is telling us what his father, mother and sister were doing then.

Time Vocabulary Examples

“Summer”, “end”, “while”, “start”, “sometimes”, “always”, “again”, “once”, “past”, “temporary”, “future”, “morning”, “today”, “all days”, “before”, “half an hour”, “at the same time”, “late”, “present”, “all the time”.

We also find different times of verbal forms.

We have present simple, present perfect continuous, past simple, present perfect, past continuous and a lot of conditional particles.

Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Gemma Verdú Trescolí
vertres@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press