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In a study of the use of the historical present (HP) tense in American English narrative, Wolfson (1982) finds that the alternation between say and said in introductions of reported speech does not function the same way as do past/HP alternations in other places. Wolfson is unable to explain say/said alternation, though she tries a number of hypotheses. The present paper reevaluates one of Wolf son's rejected hypotheses, that tense alternation in narrative dialog introducers may be related to the relative status of the reported speakers. The paper is based on an analysis of a corpus of narratives in which storytellers re-create conversations with figures of authority. Throughout the corpus, tellers use the past tense (said, was going) far more often than the HP to introduce the speech of nonauthorities, and the HP (says, goes) far more often for the speech of authority figures. This finding fits well with Schiffrin's (1981) observation that the historical present is used for evaluation in narrative. I next turn to rhetorical microanalyses of narratives to see how storytellers use tense choices to track shifts in 'footing' and 'authorship' (Goffman 1981) as they re-create dialog. The methodological points of the paper are (I) that speakers make the choices they do for a variety of reasons, so that no single explanation of any discourse feature is sufficient, and (2) that quantitative analyses of discourse must be supplemented with qualitative microanalyses of what individual speakers do in particular situations.

‘He says ... so I said’: verb tense alternation and narrative depictions of authority in American English