Study Of The Polysemy Of "V-ed" From Metaphorical And Lexicological Perspectives

A lot of modern grammarians have been studying the form of past tense which is among the most problematic areas, but they haven't got a unified view. They only pointed out that tense is a grammar category which indicates differences of time. Then they made classification, followed by the uses of past tense. However, past tense is widely used in many pragmatic environments. It is evidently not enough to explain it only by time.This paper probes into the polysemy of "v-ed" from metaphorical and lexicological perspectives. Using the basic theory of lexical meaning, we point out that the past tense marker "v-ed" is a polysemic inflectional morpheme, which has three different grammatical meanings (i.e. to express past time, to express what is contrary to the belief or expectation of the speaker, and to reflect the tentative attitude of the speaker), and we try to prove that the relationship between these three meanings is in comfort to the concatenation mode of word meaning proliferation, and the cause leading to this proliferation is conceptual metaphorization.This thesis contains a body of four chapters, together with a short introduction and a concise conclusion.Chapter 1 gives a general introduction to previous studies of past tense by Quirk et al, Douglas Biber et al, Palmer, Zhang Daozhen, Zhang Zhenbang and Bo Bing etc., and we give comments to their viewpoints.Chapter 2 deals with conventional metaphors as a basic method leading to polysemy, which provides a powerful theory for our study.Chapter 3 discusses the modes of lexical meaning development and its enlightenment.