Expressing observer perspective through «misalignment of tenses» in Danish fiction and media texts

The article studies the sequence of tenses phenomenon and its systemic violations in the modern Danish language in order to explain these phenomena from the standpoint of cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, and anthropocentrism. The subject of the study is various types of functional and contextual violations of the temporal agreement rule in Danish fiction and media texts. A linguo-pragmatic perspective chosen to study violations of the basic agreement norm helps to reveal nuances of communicative meanings. In this regard, the following phenomena are investigated: violation of the prospective agreement norm (Futurum vs. Futurum in Præterito), violation of the retrospective agreement rule (Perfektum vs. Plusquamperfektum, Præsens vs. Præteritum, Præteritum vs. Plusquamperfektum). For the first time, the categories of perspectivization and distancing were selected to explain the increasing complexity of analytical forms of the Danish verb, as well as the types of violations of temporal misalignment. The research methodology consists of: 1) correlating situations within one statement which are objectively separated in time with the grammatical forms of their predicates; 2) comparing taxis fragments of the Danish texts with their translated Russian equivalents; 3) comparing the functioning of temporal forms in fiction and media texts. Parallel literary texts, presented by Danish originals and their literary translations into Russian, as well as the National Corpus of the Modern Danish Language served as material for the study. The study reveals that temporal misalignment in Danish fiction and media texts has a common cognitive explanation based on the change in temporal perspective by the producer of the text, while the difference in specific formal types of misalignment in fiction and media is determined by their communicative purposes.