Non-past Uses Of Past Tense: A Cognitive Interpretation

Linguists have defined the notion of normal past tense as verbal form of past time indication. There are, however, a lot of occurrences in which past tense is used for other notional purposes. The issue of non-past uses of past tense has been discussed a lot and various interpretations have been provided. Linguists either classify these uses as "exceptional use" or just put it under the category of mood. The previous researches are focused on the linguistic features of past tense, while ignoring the cognitive mechanism of non-past uses of past tense.Inspired by the polysemy research done within the framework of cognitive semantics, the author puts forward the notion of "metaphorical extensions of past tense" to explain the different uses of past tense. In this approach, from the normal use of past tense, the image schema of conceptual distance is firstly abstracted. Then the metaphorical mapping of conceptual distance explains how past tense can acquire different meanings in reality and interpersonal domains. The past tense can thus be given a uniform meaning-conceptual distance. As for some non-metaphorical extensions of past tense, blending theory provides a satisfactory explanation. The thesis points out the importance of conceptual integration in the understanding of these non-metaphorical extensions. Besides, the pragmatic functions of past tense are also illustrated in the cognitive grammar framework.As a theoretical research, this thesis broadens the scope of metaphor research and develops the concept of space-builder. Themetaphorical mapping process of past tense reflects the universal mechanism how human beings acquire knowledge. The mapping from concrete domain onto the less concrete domain is supposed to be the means how people get acquainted with the unknown through the cognition of the known. The last but not least, it provides practical guidance for teaching of past tense in SLA.