A Study On The Construction Of Schematic Representation Continuum For English Future Tense And Aspect Categories

As a concept rooted in the basic human experience,time takes on a high degree of abstraction,and it is difficult to perceive it simply through human perceptual system.Only from motions and changes can human beings experience time.Doing things is time-consuming,thus constructing the connections between time,events and movements seems to be spontaneous.The correlations between events determine the sequential relationships between events.On the basis of this,the concept of time order is thus generated,which in turn produces time division for the present,past and future.Given that the events which people utilize for perceiving future time have not actually happened,the future time which is divorced from reality is considered to be the most complex.In previous studies at home and abroad,the concepts and theoretical assumptions of tense and aspect appear a posture of continuous flourish,in which various viewpoints are still a matter of discussion.Their research covers the fields of pragmatics,cognition and typology,nevertheless,few studies on the semantics of tense-aspect category,especially on the continuum of semantic representation of future tense and aspect categories are explored and discussed.People are still confused about the semantic representation for future time.In order to tackle this problem,this thesis deeply exhausts and studies the future time from the cognitive perspective.Under the framework of cognitive linguistics,this thesis constructs a continuum of schematic semantic representation for English future tense and aspect categories,and provides language learners with an avenue to express events that haven't happened yet from the viewpoint of past,present and future.Construing tenses with the help of image schema assists language learners to comprehend the concept of “future” intuitively and accurately.Firstly,it defines the concept of time,including the experiential basis of time,the conceptualization of time and the description of the nature of future time.Secondly,the future time category is classified into two dimensions.First,it attempts to analyze the structural elements of language from the perspective of tense and aspect categories,and re-examine the different linguistic phenomena in the future.Secondly,the generation and application of future time are investigated through the perspective ofmeans of expressing future.The findings of the thesis are listed as follows:Firstly,taking the trichotomy of time for past,present and future as the main division basis,the definition of future time is realized in this thesis.Secondly,the categorization of typical and atypical members of the future tense-aspect category is preliminarily clarified,which enables language learners to acquire an explicit cognition of the future tense-aspect category.Thirdly,the construction of schematic representation continuum for English future tense and aspect categories is successfully achieved in this thesis,which makes an effective cognitive interpretation of its semantic network.Fourthly,this study presents the integration mechanism of modality meaning and meaning represented by future tense and aspect categories.Through the integration of them,human expectations for future events will be reflected.Fifthly,this study contributes cognitive strategies to future tense-aspect teaching.The semantic content of future tense-aspect category representation signifies the observer establishing his position at any point of the past,future and present to examine an event from the viewing direction of posteriority for the above point.Meanwhile,the anterior events reflect a macro-integrated viewing framework,highlighting the integrity of time,while the progressive aspect category gives prominence to the close-range restricted viewing framework,foregrounding the details of an event.People often conceptualize abstract time by employing the cognitive mechanism of metaphor.The perception and conceptualization of future time originates from the fact that the future is essentially a plan,arrangement,and prediction of the present.The concept of future time is influenced by numerous modality factors,hence,it embodies diversity in expression form.Many future expressions are formed through semantic development,so that the meaning of future gently permeates and solidifies in these expressions.The cognitive study of future time category possesses both theoretical and practical significance.In theory,it enriches the scope of application of cognitive linguistics,which provides a new perspective for the semantic research of the future tense-aspect category.In practice,the research provides some enlightenment for the teaching of English tense-aspect category and means of expressing future time.