Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Motivation of the thesis
Tense is the topic that has been discussed the most by many different linguists.The Latin word “tempus”, showing the concept of time, is the origination of theword tense. Tense originally is used to distinguish time. The simple present tense isto suggest present time and the simple past tense is to suggest past time and thesimple future tense is to suggest future time. However, tense has some non-standardusages owing to the complexity of language use. Take a look at the simple presenttense. The simple present tense is not only to describe the state or the eventhappening at the present time of speaking, but also to describe the state or the eventoccurring in the past or in the future. Towards such kinds of phenomena, manylinguists, including fuzzy linguists, systemic functional linguists and cognitivelinguists, have put forward their own explanations. However, all their studies haveyet to touch the internal cognitive mechanism of those non-prototypical temporalorientations of the English tense, just superficially explaining their non-standardusages.Fuzzy linguists just thought of those usages as the fuzziness of language. Somesystemic functional linguists applied the remoteness view or the connectiveness viewto explain those usages. Other systemic functional linguists studied the English tensein terms of the discourse function and the interpersonal function. Although cognitivelinguists studied these phenomena from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, theirstudies haven’t explored the deep cognitive mechanism behind those complex usageseither, thus unable to demonstrate a comprehensive and systemic explanationtowards them.
………….
1.2 Objective of the Thesis
The author of this thesis aims to explore the internal cognitive mechanism ofthose non-prototypical temporal orientations in English tense by applying theconceptual blending theory. The author wants to find out how these three basic formsof conceptual integration operate to give rise to those non-prototypical temporalorientations of the English tense, thus uncovering the cognitive mechanism behindthose usages. For this thesis, the author mainly adopts the qualitative methods as the mainmethods. The author tries to explore the cognitive mechanism of thenon-prototypical temporal orientation of the English tense by adopting theconceptual blending theory. Zhang Daozhen advocates that the number of tense inEnglish is sixteen. The author of this thesis will choose three most basic Englishtenses as the study objects since the research is limited in space and time, includingthe simple present tense, the simple past tense and the simple future tense. Andtypical examples of the three English tenses, of course, will be listed to demonstratethe internal cognitive mechanism hidden behind the non-prototypical temporalorientation of the English tense. Most of these examples are taken from grammarbooks, which are of great authenticity. They are of great representativeness andtypicality. So the qualitative methods are adopted by the author.
………….
Chapter Two Literature review
2.1 Introduction
In this chapter, the author will firstly present definitions of tense given bydifferent scholars and give his own understanding of the ，英语论文题目，英语论文题目
|
