Nonprototypical Uses Of The English Present Tense: A Prototype Theory Approach

The English tense is an indispensably important item in English grammar. Influenced by Latin grammar, some English grammarians advocate a bi-tense view, i.e. the English tense category consists of the present and the past, while some others declare a multi-tense view, i.e. there are present tense, past tense, future tense, and some other tenses in the English tense category. This thesis stays by the bi-tense view.Traditionally, the English tense is defined as reference of time, that is, the present tense is prototypically used to express the event/state at the present time while the past tense is prototypically used to represent the event/state in the past time. However, in many situations, the present tense can be used to refer to the event/state in the past time or the future time; and the past tense can be employed to indicate the event/state at the present time or in the future time. With respect to these nonprototypical uses of the present tense and the nonprototypical uses of the past tense, grammarians at home and abroad have devoted a lot to the studies of these uses of the English tense. On the whole, these studies fall into two groups, a group of traditional study and a group of cognitive study. Though these two groups have listed many normal uses and abnormal uses of the tense and given some explanations for these uses, there is still room to make a further study of the tense category.This thesis gives a cognitive study of the nonprototypical uses of the English simple present tense, adopting the prototype theory of categorization, with the help of present-connectiveness theory of the present tense. In this thesis, we find out that the instantaneous use of the present tense is the prototypical member in the category of the English present tense, and that the unrestrictive use of the present tense and the habitual use of the present tense are good members of this category, and that the future use of the present tense and the past use of the present tense are bad members of the category, and that the imaginary use of the present tense is the marginal member of the present tense. We also can see that through family resemblance, i.e., sharing similarity of present-connectiveness, all of these nonprototypical members (i.e. the unrestrictive use of the present tense, the habitual use of the present tense, the future use of the present tense, the past use of the present tense, and the imaginary use of the present tense) are sporadically linked around the prototypical member (i.e. the instantaneous use the present tense) which exists in the center status of the present tense category.