Performing Performatives: An Analysis of Role-Playing Games’ Narration, Toward an Expansion of the Semantics of English Simple Present Verb Morphology

Abstract

In this thesis, I investigate simple present eventive verbs in English improvised fictional narrative, specifically in the context of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). Previous work predicts that the English simple present is incompatible with eventives outside of limited semantic contexts (e.g. habituals) (Langacker 2001). I ask whether there is variation between tenses and aspects in TTRPG narration and how it may pattern. I also ask which semantic variety of the simple present is found in TTRPGs, using bicontextual semantics (Anand & Toosarvandani 2019) to determine whether it is consistent with the limited previously theorized varieties, and whether and how those theories should be refined to account for this data. By building and analyzing a corpus of TTRPG gameplay transcripts, I find that the simple present is the dominant tense-aspect morphology used with eventive verbs in the corpus, and that third person singular present verbs appear in narrative contexts at a higher rate than other verb types do. I also find that all criteria are met for the TTRPG simple present to be considered a performative — with the modification that these new performatives can have non-first-person features as long as the utterer has agency over the actions of the subject of the utterance. These findings broaden the possible analyses of English tense and aspect semantics by drawing from underutilized data, and also provide linguistic evidence to support anthropological and literary conclusions drawn in previous work in game studies (Mackay 2001, Kawitsky 2020, i.a.) about the performative and agentive properties of TTRPGs.