Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!world!jcf
From: jcf@world.std.com (Joseph C Fineman)
Subject: Re: The initial sentence of jokes
Message-ID: <D8qK7q.3tx@world.std.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
References: <3paju1$nee@rzsun02.rrz.uni-hamburg.de> <3pd1jt$mlt@dove.nist.gov> <3pd56i$2gb@ss1.cam.nist.gov> <3pdbal$rto@dove.nist.gov>
Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 18:47:50 GMT
Lines: 19

I think we may have a dialect difference mixed in here.  Certainly
there are dialects in which stories, whether truth, lies, or fiction,
are routinely told in the present tense.  Cartoons & books are full of
people leaning over fences & saying "So I says,... so she says,... so
I go get the paper &...".  But _I_ don't do that.

Nevertheless, I might well tell a joke that way.  My intuition is that
that is because jokes are often prefaced with a reference to the joke
as such:  "Have you heard the one about...?", "There's and old joke in
which...".  That establishes the joke, linguistically, as a timeless
locale in jokeland, and _in_ that joke things take place in the
timeless present, analogously to "water is a liquid" and "two & two
make four".  Cf. the vivid literary usage: "In _1984_ Orwell
writes...": he has gone to his reward, but the book is present to
writer & reader.
-- 
        Joe Fineman             jcf@world.std.com
        239 Clinton Road        (617) 731-9190
        Brookline, MA 02146
