Cognitive Mechanism Of Verb Usage In English Subjunctive Mood

The subjunctive mood has been of great interest to linguists and grammarians. Up to these days quite a lot of scholars have approached the subjunctive mood from different perspectives. Grammarians discuss the definitions, classifications and significance of subjunctive mood, whereas linguists attempt to give explanations of this grammatical phenomenon with the help of linguistic theories, and the point that they attach importance to is the anomalous verb tense usage in subjunctive mood.The author of this thesis combines the psychological distance in deixis study in Pragmatics and the Conceptual Metaphor Theory in Cognitive Linguistics to construct the basic metaphor model (model 1) based on psychological distance, which macroscopically provides a new explanatory means to the choice of verb tense in English subjunctive mood, with a view to exploring the internal mechanisms of the verb usage in this special grammar phenomenon. According to this basic model composed of tense domain and psychological state domain, we argue that the manifestations of verb tenses in subjunctive mood is actually a metaphor relevant to people's psychological state when subjunctive expression is produced. In Were-subjunctive expressing the figment in the present time, the psychological distance between present tense and past tense in tense domain, serving as the DISTANCE image schema, is mapped onto the distance between reality and unreality in psychological state domain. Based on this basic model, the author further develops model 2 (past tense model) used to interpret the Were-subjunctive that describes the assumption in the past time, and then the concept of tense potential is put forward to elucidate the metaphorical mapping model in the verb use of Be-subjunctive mood, that is, model 3 (tense potential model).This thesis is divided into five parts.The first part is an introduction consisting of the objective, rationale, methodology and layout of this thesis. The second part mainly presents a concise review of previous studies on subjunctive mood from two aspects, i.e. grammar and linguistics respectively. And according to the categorizations proposed by the preceding studies, this part also determines the classification of subjunctive mood that is adopted in this study, namely, Were-subjunctive and Be-subjunctive.In the third part, this paper introduces the theoretical bases relevant to the analysis model that will be proposed in the following chapter, which includes psychological distance derived from the deixis study in Pragmatics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory in Cognitive Linguistics. In addition, the possibility of combining the two to construct the explanatory model is also discussed.The fourth part discusses first the deictic nature of tense and the psychological distance between different tenses, and then constructs a general metaphor model (model 1) to explain the verb use in the subjunctive mood. Based on model 1, the past tense model (model 2) and tense potential model (model 3) are developed. Model 1 and 2 give the explanations of Were-subjunctive and model 3 interprets why the original verb form is used in Be-subjunctive. And cases of different categories of subjunctive mood are employed to verify the explanatory power and feasibility of the models.The fifth part is the conclusion which summarizes the major findings and points out the limitations of this study, and suggestions for the further research are also made in this section.