Open Access
American Research Journal of English and Literature
ISSN (Online): 2378-9026
DOI: 10.46568/arjel
A Pragma-linguistic Analysis of the English Present and Past Tenses
Abstract
This paper explores a pragmatic approach in the analysis of the English present and past tenses.
The paper contends that the English present and past are best interpreted by examining not only the
propositions expressed within these tenses, but also the in-built meanings expressed by the pragmatics of
the context, world knowledge and word-class combinations that underpin them. Hinging on the Relevance
Theory of Communication (cf. Sperber and Wilson cited in Xinyue Yao [1], this paper concludes that the value
of a proposition is essentially speaker-hearer driven. From the end of the speaker, processing communication
entails knowing the topic-relevance of a speaker’s utterance (message). On the whole, the complexity of the
English present and past as well as incompetence in their normative properties culminate into non-pragmatic
use of them in discourse.
