A Corpus-based Study Of The Pragmatic Functions Of English Progressive Aspect

In the eyes of many English teachers and learners, English tenses are difficult to teach or learn. One important reason lies in the culture difference—Chinese has no strict tense references while English does. The other reason may be the difficulty of tenses themselves. The progressive aspect has experienced a development process from Old English, Middle English and Modern English. It is acknowledged that different English aspect has different pragmatic functions. This thesis is to explore the correlation between English progressive aspect and its pragmatic functions.The study adopts the Chinese Learner English Corpus as its data origin. Besides, it uses WordSmith tools as its processing instrument. The data obtained through concordancing were put into SPSS 13.0 (the Statistical Package for Social Sciences) software. Some statistical methods, such as Chi-square test and One-way ANOVA, were adopted in data processing and results presentation.The results of the present study are as follows:(1) Among the five forms of progressive aspect , the"is+V ing"occupies the most part and the least one is the"were+V ing". Chinese learners use the present progressive more than the past progressive. Learners of each developmental stage perform differently in the use of the progressive aspect.(2) The most used function is the descriptive function and the least used function is the interim function. Age aspect has significant effects on the choice of different kinds of pragmatic functions. When learners'age increases they tend to use more and more progressive aspect.(3) Age aspect is a factor that has significant correlation with learners'choice of different kinds of progressive aspect's pragmatic functions. There is a significant difference among the three classes (St2, St4, St6) in their choice of progressive aspect's pragmatic functions. As the learners become older, they tend to choose difficult pragmatic functions of the progressive aspect.The present study has its implications mainly in two aspects: theoretical aspect and pedagogical aspect. Certainly, the present study has its limitations. Hopefully, future studies can draw lessons from it.