A Cognitive Study Of The Means Of Expressing Future In English

Any object and phenomenon in the physical world exists in the domain of time, so time is a fundamental concept in human experience. As it is abstract, time can be neither seen nor felt. Only from motions and changes can people experience time. People name change of objective things and appearance and disappearance of any phenomenon "event", from which people get the intuitive sense of time. The fact that one event is concerned with another indicates the temporal sequence among the events. Accordingly people divide time into present, past and future. Among the three, the concept of future is the most complicated, because people have to conceptualize it from events that have not happened in the physical world.Within the framework of cognitive linguistics, the present paper has made a study of the generation of the concept of future and the means of expressing future and their uses in English. Specific research problems include the experiential basis, nature, and classification of future, the projection of semantic features of future to the means of expressing future, and mechanisms involved in this process.The study shows that human beings'experience of time is always related to their experience of events, by referring to motions and changes in the physical world, namely, human beings'understanding of time depends on their understanding of motion in space. Grounded on this, human beings conceptualize time metaphorically in terms of space, which is a familiar and concrete category for them. Because of the fact that future is a sub-concept of time, the conceptualization of future merges with the conceptualization of time. However, future events or states have not yet happened, and people cannot experience them at the present time. The reason why people can conceptualize future in reality is that future, by nature, is plan, arrangement, intention and prediction at present, which are closely related to modality. In terms of its semantic features, future can be classified into predictive future staring from the moment of speaking, predictive future starting before the moment of speaking, non-predictive future staring from the moment of speaking, and non-predictive future starting before the moment of speaking.The study also shows that through the process of representation, the concept of future is projected into language and generates the means of expressing future in English. The concept of time is mainly conveyed by the grammatical category of tense in English. The nature of future has impinged on its linguistic representation, explaining that the present tense is the linguistic representation of future in English. Moreover, future involves various kinds of modality, which results in the great variety of the means of expressing future in English. The formation of many means of expressing future has experienced a process of semantic development, in which the sense of future has been gradually bestowed onto the means of expressing future, and finally become a conventional meaning. The grammatical meaning or the lexical meaning of the means of expressing future determines whether it expresses predictive future, non-predictive future, or both, while the temporal structure of the means of expressing future determines whether it expresses future starting from the moment of speaking, or future starting before the moment of speaking.The cognitive study of future and the means of expressing future in English done in this thesis is of both theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, it has enlarged the field of the cognitive approach and offered a new approach to the study of tense in English. Practically, it can shed some light on English grammar teaching.