Virtual Thinking In The Usage Of English Tense And Aspect

A lot of research on English tense and aspect has been done in philosophy,logic and linguistics and substantial results have been yielded,but there is no unified view to the explanation of the mismatch between the form and meaning of English tense and aspect,which is called atypical use in this paper hereafter,of the present-connectiveness of simple present tense,of the vividness of historical present,of the politeness of “present time” expressed by simple past tense and past progressive aspect,and of the current relevance of present perfect aspect.Therefore,this dissertation tries to deal with atypical usages of English tense and aspect from the perspectives of virtuality,aiming to give a unified explanation to questions mentioned above.Its major research contents are as follows:1)Virtual thinking in the usages of English simple present tense;2)Virtual thinking in the atypical usages of English past tense;3)Virtual thinking in the atypical usages of progressive aspect;4)Virtual thinking in the atypical usages of perfect aspect.The research finds that all the usages of simple present and the atypical usages of past tense,progressive aspect and perfective aspect reflect virtuality,and virtual thinking here reveals itself in the form of refering to type,shifting/projecting deictic center or refering to a virtual event.Detailed results are as follows:1)In different usages of simple present tense,verbs in state present and habitual present,without being grounded,refer to type but not instance;Instantaneous present reconstructs a synchronous event in imagined space so that the sychronism of event time and description time is achieved;The virtuality in the usage of present tense indicating past and future reveals itself in the shifting of decitic center;When simple present is used to describe imagined or imaginary events in narrations,thinking takes place in an imagined space.In this case,verbs lose their deictic functions because there is no relation between the time of reading and the time of event when any reader reads them at any time.Here the advantage of virtuality is to make readers immersive at any time when they read it.2)In the atypical uses of past tense,verbs in habitual past tense don't refer to events happened actually but to the type abstracted from these events;In indirect speech and attitudinal past tense,present time is expressed and it appears more polite.Politeness is produced by the speaker projecting the deictic center onto a virtual“speech time by speaker”;The meaning of hypothetical past tense is that the action or event does not occur at the speech time or is impossible to occur in the future,i.e,the event is excluded from the reality on the speaker's side and the speaker only expresses his or her evaluation on the event.3)In the atypical uses of progressive aspect,verbs in habitual progressive refer to the concept of “habit”,an abstraction from the event whose repetition takes place over a limited period—type,rather than to the duration of an event in reality;In the use of progressive aspect indicating stative property,the event does not necessarily occur when speaking,although it may occur,it is an event with virtual occurrence;Stative verbs,when used in progressive aspect,can express dynamic meanings.Originally,the state indicated by a stative verb is durative and uninterrupted,but virtual thinking can intercept “a segment” in the state,thus highlighting it and virualizing it into a dynamic activity.In this process,the state is broken down into successive “actions”,and then making one of them salient;The use of progressive aspect indicating future time is realized by the speaker moving the speach time and the reference time to the virtual event time,that is,by foreshifting the deictic center;Verbs in present progressive aspect indicating present time are perception verbs.In this case,the event(perception)time does not coincide with the description time.While describing,the speaker virtualizes the event taking place in the mental space and replays it to the present.Its politeness is generated because the actions imposed by the speaker are virtual,and did not happen,and there is no imposition for the listener,so it sounds polite;The use of past progressive aspect indicating present time is involved with the shift and projection of deictic center,the latter for the purpose of expressing politeness;Momentary event verbs like die,win,etc.,can also be marked by progressive aspect,whose essence is to virtualize a slow motion in the mental space,it can not take place in reality.4)Present perfective aspect expresses current association.Current relevance is generated in the process of converting an event that can be described by past tense to present perfective aspect,in which the speaker shifts the past reference time to the speech time,while virtually extending the endpoint of the event to the current reference time position,virtually extending an act,whose endpoint is in the past,to the present;Verbs with different aspectual meanings,as long as they are marked by present perfective aspect,express perfect and have an endpoint before reference time.Current relevance is generated by the virtual extension of the endpoint to the speech time.It is virtualized but not inherent in present perfect aspect itself;When present perfective expressing imperfect,the speaker,by the use of time adverbials,construes a specificact as many virtual acts and virtualizes these discrete acts as a continuous state,highlighting the continuative state and explicitly expressing his subjectivity.In this case,verbs refer to type but not instance,which is virtual thinking.When past perfective aspect expresses past habits,its verb refers generically to a series of actions which are interrupted and can be repeated,other than to a specific instance of its type.While it expresses subjunctive mood,the actions described did not occur actually,reflecting virtual thinking.In short,all the usages of English simple present reflect virtual thinking,and the atypical usages of simple past,progressive and perfective aspect also reveal virtual thinking.