A Brief Study Of The English Simple Present Tense From The Perspective Of Prototype Theory

English Tense, an indispensable part in grammar, has become one of the highlight subjects studied by many linguists and grammarians, and the contemporary English tense studies are conducted mainly through the traditional approach and the cognitive approach. Traditionally, tense is accounted for as "a grammatical category for expressing time distinctions"(Binnick,1991) and there is a one-to-one correspondence between tense and time:the present tense indicating the present events/states and the past tense showing the past events/states. However, owing to the different understanding of the relationship between time and tense in English tense category, the "mismatching" occurs naturally. To put in more concretely, apart from the present uses, the English simple present tense can also refer to events/state that happened in the past or will happen in the future. The similar case goes with the past tense. Although it puts much emphasis on the prescriptiveness and descriptiveness of the language, the traditional approach is relatively weak in its explanatory power; on the other hand, because the cognitive approach attaches great importance to the descriptiveness and explanatory power in the language study, this approach enjoys profound prospect and has achieved some success in relevant research. However, it is just at the starting phase for the research circles to conduct the cognitive research, so the achievements in cognitive fields are becoming relatively rare. Therefore, by making use of the cognitive approach, the author will make a thorough and systematic analysis of the English simple present tense so as to substantiate the further research in this field,On the basis of the prototype theory of categorization and the five uses of the present tense, the author obtains the following findings:the five uses in the English simple present tense, first and foremost, constitute a polysemous category with interacting and overlapping members; then, the instantaneous use of the present tense is the prototypical member in the present tense category; the state use and the habitual use of the present tense are the good members of this category. As for the past use of the present tense and the future use of the present tense, these two uses fall into the bad examples or marginal/peripheral examples of this category. The other key point the author must put an emphasis on is that the present connectiveness is the family resemblance of this category. It is through the present connectiveness that the above five uses of the present tense have direct or indirect association with the present time, temporally or psychologically. Last but not least, in accounting for why the present tense rather than other tenses is used, the author adopts the concept of subjectivity aimed to illustrate that the human’s psychology plays an indispensable role in the non-present use of the present tense. Furthermore, the author arrives at the conclusions as follows:the present connectiveness as the family resemblance combines the above five uses into the present tense category, thus greatly reducing the learners’ burdens in comprehension and memory with the hope of validating the universality of cognitive linguistics and the rationality of the prototype theory theoretically and practically. In all, this finding can serve as one of key reference sources to the grammar teaching in middle school. Moreover, the author can verify plausibly the flexibility and workability of the application of the prototype theory to the English simple present tense. Lastly, the author is fully confident that, as long as the future researchers conduct their studies using the cognitive approach with the combination of such methods as corpus-based empirical research in due course, their studies will reveal the nature of the language to a greater extent.