Prototype Study Of English Tense As A Semantic Continuum

English tense has drawn the attention of grammarians and linguists as an important grammatical category. Traditional grammar defines tense as a grammatical category to differentiate time. Present tense denotes the event or state going on at the moment of speaking while past tense expresses the event or state that happened prior to the speech time. However, present tense can be used to refer to the past and the future and past tense can be adopted to denote present and the past. Traditional grammar can not offer a reasonable explanation for it owing to its neglect of human cognition. This thesis starts from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and carries out a prototype study of English tense as a semantic continuum, aimed at revealing the internal relationship among the various uses of English tense.We define the tense as a verbal grammatical category that can show there exists a certain relationship between the state time or the event time and the moment of speaking by means of the inflectional changes of verbs. Tense consists of two subcategories:present tense and past tense. Present tense is the verbal grammatical category by means of the verbal base form or "v-s" which "expresses the "present-connectiveness" between the action or state and the present point of time in time or in psychology"(Yi Zhongliang,1988). Past tense is the verbal grammatical category by means of "v-ed" which shows there exists a distance between the action or state and the speech time.This thesis carries out a prototype study of present tense and past tense and discovers that the various uses of present tense extends on the basis of the family resemblance:present connectiveness; the uses of past tense extends on the basis of the family resemblance: remoteness.Present tense and past tense build a semantic continuum with the prototypical members of present tense category and past tense category as the two extremes, in which stand the non-prototypical members of the two tenses and the overlapping area. Fuzziness of boundaries and metaphor are the motivations.This thesis regards English tense as a semantic continuum unfolding the close relationship between the different members of the semantic continuum and human cognition and enhancing the better understanding and application of the different members of English tense as a semantic continuum.