Figures du temps discursif

Time in discourse, or time internal to discourse, is the result of having staged a supposedly external time (« real » – measurable or experienced in real life –, fictional or otherwise), by way, more specifically, of grammatical tenses. This article does not linger on the philosophical or perceptive problems connected to external time, nor on the technical question of how grammatical tenses operate ; the accent is placed rather on the complexity of the temporal anchoring represented by the discursive present and shows how its interpretation depends on the situation of utterance, distinct from the situation of production, as well as on the way a text is inscribed in the world (whether in daily exchanges, in the press, in a scientific opus, etc.). The problem of situational anchoring is illuminated by studying how it works in theoretical writings, considered as corpora, and particularly rich in this respect.