A Cognitive Study Of The Non-prototypical Temporal Orientation In English Tense

For many linguists, tense has been a hot topic for a long time. The term Tenseoriginates from the Latin word “tempus”, which means time. Tense originally is todistinguish time. The simple present tense is used to indicate present time and thesimple past tense is used to indicate past time and the simple future tense is used toindicate future time. However, tense has some non-standard usages owing to thecomplexity of language use. Take the simple present tense as an example. Thesimple present tense is not only to describe the state or the event happening at thepresent time of speaking, but also to describe the state or the event occurring in thepast or in the future.Towards such kinds of phenomena, many linguists have put forward their ownexplanations, including fuzzy linguists, systemic functional linguists and cognitivelinguists. However, all their studies have yet to touch the internal cognitivemechanism of those non-prototypical temporal orientations of the English tense, justsuperficially explaining their non-standard usages. Fuzzy linguists just consideredthose usages as the fuzziness of language. Some systemic functional linguistsexplained them from the perspective of remoteness view and connectiveness view.Other systemic functional linguists studied the interpersonal function and thediscourse function of the English tense. Although cognitive linguists studied thesephenomena from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, their studies haven’texplored the deep cognitive mechanism behind those complex usages either, thusfailing to give a comprehensive and systemic explanation towards them.In this thesis, the author will choose non-standard usages of three basic Englishtenses as study objects, trying to give an overall explanation about thosenon-prototypical temporal orientations of the English tense under the framework ofthe conceptual blending theory. There are three basic forms of conceptual blending,including compositional integration, cutting-joining blending and mixture blending. Study shows that it is the cutting-joining blending and the mixture blending thatmainly operates behind the non-prototypical temporal orientations in the Englishtense. The specific operational mechanism reveals the cognitive mechanism hiddenbehind those non-prototypical temporal orientations in the English tense.