The construction of temporal dynamic in journalism: analysis of the use of verbal forms in narrative sequences in news reports

Abstract

This paper makes a partial presentation of the results of the research developed in Cunha (2013), in order to evince how journalists use verbal forms to build the temporal dynamic in narrative sequences in their texts. In order to carry out an adequate study of the verbal forms in Portuguese, this research resorted to Fiorin’s (2010, 2011) proposition as an analytical tool to study the regularities and the specificities of the verbal forms used in the 53 narrative sequences of the corpus. The analyses put in evidence the complex use of verbal forms by journalists to express the temporal dynamic of the events narrated, as well as the deep relation between verbal forms and the discourse genre.