A Cognitive And Pragmatic Analysis Of English Simple Past Tense For Politeness

The English tense system has been a focus for linguists and grammarians. As one basic form of English tenses, the past tense has received much attention. The past tense can be used for-politeness purpose, which is a common phenomenon in English and draws attention of many linguists. However, restricted by the limitations of the understanding of the past tense and its uses, some linguists term this phenomenon as subjunctives or something like that.(Palmer,1986:38) Furthermore, the reason why past tenses can occupy such functions has more or less been ignored.(秦风,2004)With the development of the research on this phenomenon, a proliferation of different theoretical approaches and analyses has sprung up. Quirk, et al.(1985:86-87) points out the non-past use of the past tense and treats this usage as "attitudinal past", for it can reflect the speaker’s tentative attitude. As an advocator of the "remoteness" view, Yi(易仲良,1987:16-19) puts it under the category of mood and fails to explain why distance can nurture politeness. And this use of the past tense is termed as "pragmatic softener" by Taylor (1995), who focuses on the explanation of polysemy and family resemblance of the usages of the past tense under the framework of prototype theory.It is a pity that these linguists just touch on this issue without much detailed illustration. Thus, in order to fill the gap in this subject area, this thesis attempts to provide a comprehensive exploration of the working mechanism from cognitive and pragmatic perspectives.Firstly, this paper offers a cognitive account of English past tense for politeness. And this account is mostly done within the framework of these relevant theories:image schema, metonymy, metaphor and mental space. The past-time use will be treated as the prototype in time domain while the non-past uses will be treated as a result of metaphorical mappings based on the distance image schema. Then this distance image schema in the time domain is ready to map onto the two involved mappings as follows:the metaphorical mapping from the time domain onto the reality domain and then onto the psychology domain, resulting in politeness. In addition, the whole process is concatenate. In mental space theory, meaning is thought to be small conceptual packets built up when we think and talk. As discourse is processed, meanings are constructed by mental spaces as a result of cues, among which past tense is served as a grammatical marker. The simple past tense reflects not only local time relation between neighboring spaces, bus also the shift of V-POINT and FOCUS. Different spaces are built through shift of V-POINT and FOCUS. A new mental space, in which the PAST is extended to indicate interpersonal distance, is built to make the utterance polite.Then the English past tense for politeness is explored from a pragmatic perspective. In English, the past tense is employed to express subjective demands, including inquires, requests, suggestions, invitations, etc. In this condition, the speaker metaphorically indicates the distance between the binding force of reality and subjective demands by the imaginary distance of the past tense. Thus, the utterance becomes much more indirect and seems to offer the hearer much more optionality to meet the pragmatic purpose of making the hearer feel no pressure to respond to the speaker’s demands or even meet the demands. The distance of the past tense can alleviate the binding force of the reality and the subjective demands. The employment of the past tense instead of the present tense can avoid a confrontation, saving the face of both the speaker and the hearer. Thus the utterance tends to be polite.This thesis uncovers the underlying mechanism from cognitive and pragmatic perspectives and this is of great value for our cognition and exploitation of language, thus this thesis is of certain significance.