A Case Study Of English Simple Past Tense In The Scarlet Letter Based On The Prototype Theory

English tense has always been an important grammatical category and it is also one of the primary objects of study by linguists and grammarians.We all know that tense can be seen as grammatical category which is used to discriminate the difference of time.English simple past tense not only represents the action or state of the past time,but also expresses the counterfactual and politeness.Representative of structuralism Chomsky and the typical representative of functionalism Halliday make too much explanation of the English simple past tense from the perspective of usage or structure.The study of the features of English simple past tense has extended to another field which is the starting point of the thesis.Prototype theory is one of the most important theories in cognitive linguistics.According to the prototype theory,category is built upon the scope of the prototype.Whether an object is classified into a category or not remains a question.We can see whether it has enough family resemblance with all the numbers in the category.The event usage,state usage,habitual usage,counterfactual usage and politeness usage of the English simple past tense have family resemblance and there is a distance between the action time and the reference time.In this thesis,Hawthorne's novel “the Scarlet Letter” is selected as a corpus.The study uses the prototype theory as the theoretical foundation.This thesis adopts qualitative analysis and corpus-based approach in the process of studying.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter introduces the background and significance of the study.The second chapter is about the tense,the study of English simple past tense at home and abroad and the brief introduction to the Scarlet Letter.The third chapter points out the theoretical foundation and research methodology.The fourth chapter pints out the research questions:(1)What are the types and ratios of English simple past tense in the Scarlet Letter?(2)What are the features of English simple past tense in the Scarlet Letter from the perspective of the prototype theory?(3)What are the effects of English simple past tense on characterization in the Scarlet Letter from the perspective of the prototype theory? The last chapter is about the major findings,limitations of the study and suggestions for further studies.There are five uses of the English simple past tense.They are event usage,state usage,habitual usage,counterfactual usage and politeness usage.The uses of English simple past tense can be divided into prototypical use and non-prototypical use.As for the effects on Characterization,the prototypical use indicates experience,status and education background of the characters;the non-prototypical use indicates the people's inner world.