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Chapter 1 Introduction

1 .1Research Orientation
In the eyes of many English teachers and learners, English tenses are difficult toteach or learn. One important reason lies in the culture difference—Chinese has nostrict tense references while English does. The other reason may be the difficulty oftenses themselves.As we know, tense contains aspect. That is to say aspect is the subcategory oftense. English has many kinds of aspects. Among all the tenses, progressive aspecthas been researched a lot, and its research is continuing now.Before the progressive aspect is introduced, the progressive verb form in Englishshould be researched. It is well worth our attention for at least two reasons. Onereason is that this construction, consisting of a form of TO BE followed by the-ing-form of the next verb in the verb phrase, is one which does not have any obviousparallel in any of the languages that English is most closely related with. Hence thestudy of this form is important from a contrastive point of view, and for the teachingof English as a second language. Obviously, it makes a great deal of differencewhether one says ‘I crossed the street when I noticed her’ rather than ‘I was crossingthe street when I noticed her’, or ‘Mary speaks with an Irish accent’ rather than ‘Maryis speaking with an Irish accent’, and that is a difference which foreign learners needto be taught.Also, the frequency of the progressive has long been on the increase, an increasewhich seems to be continuing unabated in present-day English which makes it all themore important that we should try to understand the use and meaning of this verbform. To further that understanding it may be helpful to study the historicaldevelopment of the progressive: how it came to be what it is.It is acknowledged that different English aspects have different pragmaticfunctions. Pragmatics is in fact concerned with whatever information is relevant, overand above the linguistic properties of a sentence, to understanding its utterance. In thisstudy, the progressive aspect’s pragmatic functions are studied in detail. It isdiscussed from different views—English progressive aspect and settings, Englishprogressive aspect and participants and the development of pragmatic functions in it.

1.2 Rationale
The present study is motivated by the following three aspects:Firstly, most of the studies on the English acquisition have focused on theacquisition of a specific European language by native speakers of other Europeanlanguages, especially the Germanic and Romance languages. In another word, the Llsand the L2s involved in most of the studies are just similar languages. Among them,only a few studies have involved non-European language speakers(Bardovi-Harlig&Reynolds, 1995; Bardovi-Harlig, 1998). So it is necessary thatmore studies on language learners with a much broader range of language backgroundare needed to add to the universality of observations or theoretical claims. As weknow, English and Chinese are typologically very different languages: English hasboth tenses and aspects but Chinese only has a rich system of aspect markers; theEnglish perfective past can be used with any kind of verbs, but Chinese aspectmarkers can only occur with certain types of verbs, etc (Cai, 2003:14). Chineseresearchers (Cai, 2003; Fan, 2005; Nie, 2005; Niu, 2007) have already becomeaware of such situation and some related studies f本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。