Janice Carruthers’ book is both highly academic and a pleasure to read. It deals mainly with Tense-Switching in French oral narration, a context not examined until now. She distinguishes three categories, namely conversational stories, traditional storytelling and the néo-contes, using corpora from the GARS (Groupe aixois de recherche en syntaxe) for conversational storytelling and the Aubrac collection for the traditional stories. The néo-contes come from a variety of sources, including the CLIO (the Centre de littérature orale based in Vendôme). The stories themselves are very different not only in length but, more importantly, in terms of levels of spontaneity. The content goes from stories occurring naturally in conversation, to traditional storytelling within a small community, to the new forms of storytelling which appeared in France in the 1980s, which are directed at a more impersonal and often paying audience. These are the most influenced by the written word and literature generally, and are particularly interesting since they constitute a kind of borderline discourse, in the same way television, radio, and electronic communication do. The author's hope is that this study will open new horizons for the study of the latter both in descriptive and theoretical terms, and I certainly think it does.

Chapter 1 deals with theoretical and methodological preliminaries. The latter include explanations as to which recordings were used and why, and how the three corpora were treated in order to make them comparable. The starting point from a theoretical point of view is how to define narration. This is followed by a review of the literature on the values and functions of the tenses normally found in narrative clauses. These include the passé simple (PS), the passé composé (PC) and the narrative present (NPR), and potentially the pluperfect (PLP) and the narrative imperfect (NIMP). Tense-Switching is also examined within this general review of the literature context.

Chapter 2 examines the narrative tenses actually found in each corpus, with a nice section in each case labelled ‘final comments’ which gives a summary of the main points found regarding each tense in relation to the corpus. The findings are extremely varied in nature. For example, at the end of Conversational Stories, we read, among other conclusions, that ‘tense is anaphoric in stories but deictic in reports’ (p. 49) (Reports are distinguished from Stories in that they contain other discourse modes such as Information or Argument). Analysis of Traditional Story-telling reveals that the norm for Tense-Switching is between PC and NPR, while the study of the néocontes introduces the importance played by performance elements such as staged sound effects (absent from the other two forms of storytelling).

Chapter 3 deals with actual Tense-Switching on the Narrative Line. This includes a study of the structural functions of PC/NPR alternation in different discourse modes, which leads to interesting conclusions such as the fact that alternation can be a feature of the ‘turbulence’ found at narrative peaks, while the rare NIMPs lead to deceleration. Also that NPR may move the narrative forward, while PC may have a closing function. More importantly, Tense-Switching is multi-dimensional, with one shift having more than one function, and needs to be seen in connection with shifts of voice, focalisation and subjectivity. Some of the results in this chapter also point to a certain continuity existing between modern storytelling and its medieval counterpart.

Whereas the previous two chapters deal with tense usage in narrative clauses, the final chapter examines the structures between Narrative Clauses in terms of subordinators, coordinators, adverbs, connectors and parataxis. A distinction is made between markers indicating progression explicitly (i), implicitly (ii), possibly (iii) or an absence of any such markers (iv). Having examined all three corpora from that point of view, the conclusion is that they show more similarities in this respect than differences, and that categories (iii) and (iv) are by far the most common, explicit and implicit markers being rare in all cases. Register is also shown to play a large part in the choice of markers.

The strength of the book is in showing how much more complex Tense-Switching is in oral narratives than could have been expected, and – even more importantly – the need to use all kinds of tools, i.e. not only narrowly linguistic, but semantic and pragmatic to approach such complex areas of research. It also encourages a new broader look at a whole range of different kinds of discourse with an oral dimension. And from the reader's point of view it includes, en passant, a wonderfully clear exposition of areas that s/he may have not looked at closely, given the tendency to concentrate on one approach only. [Namely, Moeschler's summary of the theoretical approaches to temporal sequencing (in convenient diagram form), different approaches to tenses on the narrative line (Weinrich, Benveniste, Waugh, Vetters, Revasz, myself, and others), Smith's Narrative mode and Report Mode, Leech and Short's continuum of discourse forms (another useful diagram), Fleisshman's table of markedness oppositions for the past and present tenses in ordinary language (adapted), and, Borillo's classification of subordinators. (It also includes niceties such as the fact that there are more than 100 different usages of the coordinator et!)]. Altogether a most enlightening book.