The Cohesive Function Of Tenses In English Texts

It is beyond challenge that tense occupies a crucial position in English grammar, but little has been achieved about its cohesive function in text. In the early seventies, when text analysis was still in its early stages, a number of important works dealing with the subject of cohesion were published, among which Halliday and Hasan's studies enjoy the popularity even up to now. However, they neglected the textual function of tense in their classification of cohesive devices. Though grammarians such as Quirk et al have realized the use of tense in text, far from enough efforts have been made to systemize this language phenomenon. This paper, through the study of Halliday and Hasan's achievements, deduces two basic criteria for being a cohesive device, then proves that tense does measure up, and finally proposes that tense should be a supplement to Halliday and Hasan's classification. Excluding introduction ad conclusion, this paper consists of four chapters.Chapter One makes a comprehensive survey of past research on cohesion and deduces the criteria;Chapter Two presents a detailed illustration of tenses in relevance to time from a grammatical point of view;Chapter Three concentrates on the study of tense in text. Each genre has its own preference for primary tense, either Simple Present or Simple Past, which serves as a line or chain to connect the text as a whole. Tense may be used consecutively with others within or out of the same time frame to achieve different cohesive function. This chapter is the theoretical frame of the whole paper.Chapter Four emphasizes practice. The theory discussed in the previous chapter is applied to several texts to test its validity.