17
fell asleep. Meanwhile, the seven drawfs were coming home from
work. They went inside. There they found Snow White sleeping. Then Snow White woke up. She saw the dwarfs. The dwarfs said,
“what is your name?” Snow White answered, “my name is Snow white.”
The other dwarf asked, “if you wish, you may live here with us.” Snow White said, “Oh, could I? Thank you” Then Snow
White told the dwarfs the whole story, and Snow White and the 7 dwarfs lived happily ever after.
6. Grammatical Features of Narrative Text
Narrative usually includes the following grammatical features: a.
Nouns that identify the spesific characters and place in the story b.
Adjectives that provides accurate description of the characters and setting.
c. Verbs that show the actions that occur in the story.
d. Time words that connect events, telling when they occured.
20
According Aristotle’s definition, there have been many attempts to establish criteria which would define the well-formed story. Among the
many suggested, two seem to be widely accepted. The first is that, to count as a narrative, there has to be a sequence of narrative clauses clauses
containing a verb in the simple past tense or, sometimes, the historic present tense whose order matches the real time order of the events
described in those clauses. These clauses constitute the heart of the story, or narrative „core’. The second is that a story has to have a beginning,
middle and an end
21
.
20
Ibid,p.4
21
Thornborrow and Coates, The Sociolinguistics of Narrative, Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing, 2005,p.3
18
From the explanation above, it can be concluded that narrative text is the text that tells a story and when the story only contains the beginning
or just the middle or just in the end, it cannot be a good story because there must be the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. It is to make
the story good and easy to be understood.
C. Tense
1. The definition of Tense
The word “tense” is derived ultimately from the latin tempus meaning time.
22
Tense commonly refers to the time of the situation which relates to the situation of the utterance or at the moment of speaking.
There are many definitions of tense. One of them is as stated by Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik stated that by tense we understand the
correspondence between the form of the verb and our concept of time past, present, future.
23
And Michael Swan stated that the verb-forms which show differences in time are called tense. Tense are formed either
by changing the verb e.g. know, knew, known; work, worked, worked, or by adding auxiliary verb e.g. will know, had worked.
24
Tense refers to the indication of time by the form of the verb or verb phrase, whether an action is a present, past or future one.
Based on the statements above, the writer concludes that tense is a verb-form or series of verb forms used to express a time relation, and tense
refers to the time of the situation relating to the situation of the utterance.
2. Types of Tense
Tense is used to show the relation between the action or state described by the verb and the time, which is reflected in the form of the
verb. There are two basic tenses in English; the present tense and the past
22
John Lyons, Linguistic Semantic An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p.312
23
Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik, A Communicative Grammar of English, London: Pearson Education Limited, 2002, 3
rd
ed., p.415
24
Michael Swan, Practical English Usage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 604
