英语论文网

Chapter One   Introduction

1.1 Key Concepts 
Tense stems from tempus in Latin, which represents time. Because Latin exerts great  influence on prescriptive grammar, people usually claim that tense is a kind of linear objective time  relation  in  English(Homby,1997&Poutsma,1926).However,  tense  and  time  are  two different concepts. Time is taken as the category of philosophy, which is one of the objective forms of material existence. It is a representation of continuity and time sequence in physical movement (Yang Ming, 1999).But tense belongs to verb category and it has evident grammar meanings. Tense is used to locate a situation in time axis to indicate when the situation took place(Comrie,1985:9).It is a kind of verb form about behavior, action state in various time conditions, aiming at indicating the relationship among them. We can say that tense is an important means of expressing time. Therefore tense has a close relationship with time. A large amount of researches on tense have been done by people with a long history of 2,500 years since ancient Greece. During this process ,a lot of academic papers and books are emerging(He Wei,1999).But  they  have  not  reached  a  consistent  view  on  the  nature  of  tense,  the  time Reference point is also included .Throughout history, the domestic and foreign linguists and grammarians all have done relevant study on this topic (Bo Bing1999;Comrie 1986;Leech 1978;Quirk 1985;Zhang Daozhen 1998;Zhang Zhengban 2003).They all claim that tense is a grammatical representation which was used to understand the consistent relationship between the concept of present, future and past and their verb forms by native English speakers. That’s to say, the present tense represents the situation which happens at current time, the past time refers to the situation which occurred before the present time and the future tense means that things take place subsequently to the present time. 
.........

1.2 Research Background 

In English, different time, time relations and action state of the verbs can be represented by tense which is filled with different forms. We find it tough to understand the nature and essence of the world without tense. F.R. Palmer (1965) argues that learning a language is, to a large degree,  learning  how  to  cope  with  verbal  forms  of  that  language  .In  order  to  achieve  a successful  communication,  people  have  to  use  various  tenses  to  indicate  diverse  relations between  action  state  and  its  reference  time.  Therefore,  tense  is  an  indispensable  part  in communication. What is more, the difference on temporal expression between English and Chinese is obvious. Because English is considered as tensed thought language (Lowe, 1987), while Chinese is a kind of language without tense. In this way, it usually poses all kinds of errors for Chinese ESL learners during the process of acquiring tense, especially when they are composing a composition. Just as Yang Huizhong, Weir (1998) put forward that writing ability is a comprehensive test for students' language output. It can detect st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。