| Summary: | "Past. Present. Future. These are the three principal verb tenses available in English that allow us to express time. But there are many more options than tense alone. There is the entire T-A-M spectrum, which stands for tense, mood, and aspect. Tense marks past, present, and future. Aspect describes how past events are experienced in the present, or how the future is conceived and framed. And mood lets speakers distinguish fantasy from reality. Together, the T-A-M spectrum forms the backbone of syntax, that tricky sub-domain of grammar that lets English speakers create new worlds and make sense of the existing one. But syntaxes can tell us about much more than just time. They have profound implications for our conceptions of, and perceptions of, many matters, from the deeply personal (the narratives we construct about ourselves) to political and social matters. When you need to leave a room, do you ask, "may I be excused (weak conditional)," which implies collaboration, or "can I be excused (strong conditional)," which evokes an authoritarian stance? When speaking of lost loves, would you say, "I loved them" (past perfect), which describes an experience that is over? Or would you say, "I have loved them" (past imperfective), which describes an experience that continues? The rules of grammar cannot answer these questions for us. Such questions are in the domain of rhetoric, or persuasion, and require careful consideration of the complex ways syntaxes work in discourse. Syntaxes can help us understand our current political reality and shape persuasive discourse to address the many crises that seem to be everywhere at the current moment. "Tense Times: Syntax and Surprise in US Crisis Culture" shows how every instance of discourse can be read for its dominant verb form or syntax and how, in turn, those syntaxes create the very crises they describe. The book investigates a dozen popular discourses from the past decade of U.S. political culture, including Beyoncé's controversial hit single "Formation," the presidential campaign slogans of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, plans for a mosque at Ground Zero, and the death of George Floyd. Integrating theories of syntax from rhetorical, literary, affect, and cultural studies as well as linguistics and computer science, "Tense Times" shows how syntaxes form the fault lines of public argument, just like ideologies or political parties. Crucially, as Lee M. Pierce shows, those syntaxes do not merely describe experiences of crisis but actually bring those experiences into existence. But, as the book's comparative reading strategy illustrates, not all crisis experiences are created equal. Pierce's study is organized into three main chapters, each concerned with a particular verb form that cuts across the tense-aspect-modality (or TAM) spectrum: the historical present tense, the past imperfective aspect, and the retroactive subjunctive mood. Each chapter explores the workings of that given verb form in three distinct discourses, each of which comprises hundreds of texts ranging across media from traditional speeches and printed news to Tweets, protest signs, and music videos. Readers interested in language will get a fresh look at how tense, mood, and aspect work in large discourses (as opposed to singular texts). Readers interested in politics, American culture, and current events will see recent public controversies from a new angle where our choice of verbs is as persuasive as our choice of political party"--
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