Subjectification And Non-referential Usages Of English Tenses

It is generally the case that English tense is time referential, situating an event in time, which is the prototypical and objective meaning of it. However, it also has many non-referential usages, which are often referred to as the special or abnormal uses. Non-referential tenses mainly express four kinds of meanings:intimacy, attenuation, salience and actuality. These four meanings are in fact related with a speaker's subjectivity and are four subjective meanings.With the development of cognitive and functional linguistics, much attention has been paid to the subjectivity of language. Subjectivity is the self-imprint of a speaker in his utterance and subjectification concerns the structures and strategies that a language speaker uses to realize his or her perspective or point of view and the relevant processes of language evolution. After presenting the four major subjective meanings non-referential tenses express, this study centers on investigting the relationship between non-referential usages of English tenses and subjectification, that is, how the three aspects central to the study of subjectivity and subjectification: the speaker's affect, epistemic stance and perspective, impact the usages of English tenses. When tenses are affected by any of the three aspects, what kind of semantic features they exhibit and what typical contexts or syntactic features the subjectificated tenses favor. Metaphor, as the major mechanism for meaning extension, is also the major working mechanism for subjectification. Primary Metaphor Theory developed from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, claims that the source concepts and the target concepts differ in that target concepts refer to the external world while source concepts reflect the speaker's internal world and are related with the speaker's subjectivity. Target and source concepts relate with each other by experiential correlation, or to say, by repeatedly experiencing the co-occurrence of experiences. This study will also take use of Primary Metaphor Theory to briefly analyze how subjectification is licensed in English tenses.Through a systemic study, this thesis puts forward the following ideas:when tenses are influenced by the speaker's affect, tenses become marked with two kinds of attitudes of the speaker towards his communication partner:intimate and distant, which are adopted according to the pragmatic distance; when tenses are affected by epistemic stance, tenses are marked with the speaker's assessment as to the actuality of an utterance. Tenses are marked with two degrees of actuality states:high and low; the influence of a speaker's perspective in tenses is manifested in two types:a shift of perspective to increase or decrease the salience of certain part of information; a change of starting point of narration to increase the actuality of an utterance.This study finds that the non-referential usages of English tenses are resulted from subjectification. The subjectification process of English tenses is a semantic-pragmatic process where the pragmatic meaning is strengthened, the referential meaning becomes non-referential and the objective meaning becomes subjective. Due to subjectification, English tenses do not need to abide by some traditional grammarian rules, and thus the so-called "abnormality" and "specialty" of these non-referential uses become acceptable. But on the other hand, the syntax and context where subjectification of English tenses occurs are also limited.This study gives a comprehensive analysis of the non-referential usages of English tenses by exploring the subjective side, which will deepen the understanding of English tenses and be favorable for systematic teaching and learning of special uses of the English tense.