Engaging the audience An intersubjectivity approach to the historic present tense in Latin

In accordance with the commonly acknowledged semantic value of the Latin present tense of ‘simultaneity with the moment of speech’, scholars have tended to formulate the main function of the historic present tense in terms of the addition of a certain vividness or dramatization to the narrative: by artificially transferring the deictic center of the speech event (the ‘discourse now’) to the reference time of the characters in the narrated world (the ‘story now’), the speaker/writer creates a form of narration with the features of an eye-witness account, in which the addressee/reader, on account of a pretended unmediated access to the recounted events, may feel maximally immersed.
This ‘vividness’ explanation of the historic present has, however, also been criticized for both its vagueness and its restricted applicability. In this article we will show that in a selected narrative corpus ̶ book 22 of Livy’s historiographical work Ab Urbe Condita ̶ , only very few instances of the historic present might actually be accounted for in terms of an effect of immersion or vividness. On the basis of a mixed discourse-linguistic, cognitive-linguistic and narratological instrument of analysis, we will argue that the vast majority of instances of the historic present tense in Livy book 22 are used quite differently, and that the present’s inherent feature of ‘epistemic immediacy’ is used predominantly for strategic structuring of the text rather than for the effect of a vivid eye-witness account. By discussing a number of examples, we will illustrate the subtle ways in which Livy exploits the cognitive and functional potential of the present tense as established in our analysis – viz. indicating the common ground status of the information referred to ̶ for smoothly and unobtrusively taking the audience along in the construction process of his complex narrative.