A Metaphorical Approach To The English Tense

The English tense system has always been one of the main subjects for linguists and grammarians. Palmer (1974: 43) believes that the most important function of tense is to indicate past and present time. Quirk, et al (1972) state that the present tense normally refers to present time and the past tense refers to past time. However, the present tense can also refer to events/states that happened in the past or will happen in the future. The past tense can also refer to events/states that happen at the present time or will happen in the future. The issue of these various uses of the past tense and the present tense has been discussed a lot and various interpretations have been provided. Linguists either classify these uses as"exceptional use"or just put them under the category of mood, which makes the English tense both difficult to interpret and to learn. The previous researches are focused only on the linguistic features of the English tense, ignoring the cognitive mechanism of the different uses of the past tense and the present tense.With the development of cognitive linguistics, quite a number of researchers home and abroad have tried new ways to understand and interpret tense in English. And special efforts have been exerted on the study of the English tense and achievements have been made. This thesis takes their achievements as the foundation and tries to offer a coherent and systematic explanation to the different uses of the past tense and the present tense with the help of the conceptual metaphor theory.This thesis claims that the prototypical use of the past tense is to indicate the distance in time, from which the distance image schema is firstly abstracted. Through the metaphorical thinking of people, that is, metaphorical mapping, the distance image schema in the time domain extends its meaning to the reality domain and the psychology domain. Thus, the hypothetical past and the attitudinal past are the metaphorical extensions of the prototypical use of the past tense. The various uses of the past tense share the same image schema. The essence of the past tense is distance.Although the essence of the present tense is different from that of the past tense, this thesis also argues that it has the same reasoning mechanism in the extension as the past tense. The prototypical use of the present tense is to express the proximity in time. Through metaphorical mapping, the proximity image schema in the time domain is mapped onto the reality domain, the imaginary reality domain and the psychology domain. The mapping is based on the proximity image schema, which is abstracted from the prototypical use of the present tense. The essence of the present tense is proximity.This thesis adopts the metaphorical approach to study the English tense. By analyzing the prototypical uses of the present tense and the past tense, we give a convincing and reasonable explanation of these various uses of the English tense. The metaphorical approach used in this thesis provides a new perspective for the study of the English tense. The metaphorical mapping processes of the past tense and the present tense reflect the universal cognitive mechanism of human beings, that is, we acquire knowledge from known to unknown. The last but not least, the new interpretation of the different uses of the English tense offers a practical help for the teaching and learning of tense.