Morphological Construction: A Constructionist Approach To English Tense

Tense is traditionally defined as"a grammatical category for expressing time distinctions", therefore, the present tense usually expresses present events, while past tense expresses past events. However, large amount of natural language data show that present tense can refer to not only the happening event, but also the event that exists all time, already happened or will happen. Likewise, past tense can refer to not only the past event, but also the events that are imaginative, counterfactual; what's more, by using past tense, the speaker can express the politeness for the hearer.The paper combines intuitions from construction grammar and morphology to develop the framework of morphological construction, which provides a mechanism for describing and explaining English tense system in a more motivated and systematical way. The proposed framework holds that the basic units of morphology also can be constructions (form-meaning pairings), which have meanings independent of lexicon; and such constructions are also polysemic categories, which are established by the family resemblance in that multiple peripheral meanings are extended from a prototype by metaphor and metonymy.According to the proposed framework, English tense system consists of present and past tenses, which both are polysemic categories established by the family resemblance: present tense is first used for reference to the present moment (the prototypical meaning), then by metonymy, in generic statements with reference to"the structure of the world", then by metaphor (now can be construed as closeness subjectively), of historic use and future use; likewise, past tense is first used for reference to past time (the prototypical meaning), then by metonymy, in fictional narratives, then by metaphor (past can be construed as distance subjectively), to express counterfactuality and pragmatic softening. In so doing, this thesis succeeds in not only explicating semantics of English tense, but also revealing the cognitive motivation of its polysemic extension. The study expands construction grammar theory– application of construction grammar to smaller linguistic unit: morphemes, while solving a traditional problem in grammatical analysis; meanwhile, it also sheds light on language teaching.