Examining Tense Shifts and Narrative Coherence across Literary, Academic, and Journalistic Genres: A Discourse-Analytic Study

Abstract

Tense shifts are an essential feature of narrative discourse because they help writers organize events, establish temporal relationships, and guide readers through the development of a text. While English tense has been widely examined from grammatical and semantic perspectives, relatively few studies have explored how tense shifts contribute to narrative coherence across different genres. This study investigates the functions of tense shifts in literary, academic, and journalistic texts and examines how they influence readers' understanding of temporal relationships and the overall coherence of a narrative. A qualitative research design was adopted, combining discourse analysis of twenty purposively selected English-language texts with a reader-response survey involving twenty English-proficient participants. The analysis identified the most common patterns of tense shifting and examined how these patterns affected temporal organization, textual clarity, and reader engagement. The findings suggest that carefully managed tense shifts, particularly transitions from the past simple to the past perfect and the selective use of the present tense within predominantly past-tense narratives, make the sequence of events easier to follow and strengthen narrative coherence. In contrast, tense changes that are not supported by clear contextual cues may interrupt the flow of the narrative and increase the effort required for interpretation. The study shows that effective tense management functions not only as a grammatical feature but also as an important discourse strategy that supports clear and coherent communication across different genres. These findings provide useful insights for writers, educators, editors, and translators while contributing to ongoing research in discourse analysis and narrative studies.