A Cognitive Approach To The Uses Of The English Present Progressive

The English progressive has always been an indispensably significant item forlinguists and grammarians. There are always different types of the aspect. This thesisadvocates a bi-aspect view that the English aspect is composed of the progressiveaspect and perfective aspect.Traditionally, the present progressive is prototypically applied to express theongoing event/state at the time of speaking. However, in many cases, the presentprogressive can be employed to indicate various situations. Scholars at home andabroad have done a lot of researches of these uses of the English progressive from thetraditional perspective. These scholars have listed normal use and abnormal uses of theprogressive and mostly focused on explaining their linguistic features. As time goes by,there are more and more researchers who have tried to explore the progressive from thecognitive perspective so that quite a number of achievements have been graduallymade. However, there is still a large room for a further exploration of the Englishpresent progressive.Based on the previous studies, this thesis makes a tentative study of the uses ofthe present progressive by adopting the prototype theory and conceptual metaphortheory in cognitive linguistics. The thesis claims that the present progressive should betreated as a prototype category, which consists of prototypical member andnon-prototypical members linked around the prototypical one. The prototypical use ofthe progressive is to indicate ongoing event/state, which originally implies the distancein the space domain. An increasing number of usages gradually emerge bymetaphorical extension. There are the future-indicating and past-indicating uses of thepresent progressive, the politeness and idiomatical uses of the present progressive. Thismeans that through the cross-domain mapping, the distance image schema in the spacedomain is extended to the time domain and psychology domain respectively. Themetaphorical extension process also indicates human beings’ cognitive mechanism: people acquire knowledge from familiar to unfamiliar and known to unknown.Therefore, the non-prototypical uses are all treated as the metaphorical extension of theprototypical use of the present progressive. Meanwhile, the new interpretation of thevarious uses of the present progressive in this thesis can extensively provideimplication and help for English learners and teachers.