A Cognitive Study On The Non-past Uses Of The Simple Past Tense

English tense has attracted the attention of many linguists for a long time. It was classified as a grammatical category indicating time distinctions originally. However, language uses are becoming more and more complicated with the development of society. The original uses of tense can not meet the needs of expressing our ideas. So the non-typical uses came into being. For example, the simple past tense is not only used to indicate the past event or state, it also refers to the present or future time. The counterfactual past, indirect speech and pragmatic softeners are the representative cases of its non-past uses.For these phenomena, many linguists have put forward their own explanations. Fuzzy linguists attributed these uses to the fuzziness of language. Systemic functional linguists focused their study on the interpersonal function and the discourse function of English tense. Cognitive linguists raised the concept of “distance of language”. But all of these failed to explore the deep cognitive mechanisms behind these language phenomena.Mental space theory is a theory that studies meaning, and mental space plays an important role in meaning construction and extension process. The process of meaning extension is naturally the configuration of different mental spaces. This paper mainly explains these three non-past uses of the simple past tense from the perspective of mental space. Thus a better understanding and mastering of English tense can be achieved by investigating cognitive mechanisms in the non-typical uses.