The relation between experience, conceptual structure and meaning: non-temporal uses of tense and language teaching
Andrea Tyler and Vyvyan Evans
(Extract)
There are four kinds of non-temporal uses of tense that we will consider. The first function relates to a designation of
intimacy between the speaker/s and others. The second relates to what we will term
salience (commonly referred to as
foregrounding and
backgrounding in the discourse literature). The third concerns what we will term
actuality, in which tense is used to signal the extent to which the experiencer (or speaker) believes the event described corresponds to the actual world-state and conditions holding (this has been variously termed
epistemic stance, cf. Fillmore 1990, or as a distinction between
realis and
irrealis). The fourth function concerns what we will term
attenuation, in which certain speech acts are "softened"' or
mitigated in terms of their threat to
face (cf. Brown and Levinson 1987). This function is commonly referred to in terms of linguistic politeness phenomena.
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/vyv/Exper ... eaning.pdf
BAD SCIENCE!!:
The argument is that in a sentence such as: I just wanted to ask you if
you could lend me a pound (ibid.: 19), the addressee can determine from
context that the use of the past tense does not relate to a past desire,
but rather to a current situation.
This common approach has tended to
reinforce the view that non-temporal uses should be treated as exceptions*.
The difficulty for language teachers, and one we have faced ourselves in classroom settings, is how to insightfully present the nontemporal uses associated with tense. The approach offered by received wisdom, as reflected in course books and pedagogical grammars, is
to treat them as exceptions, or worse to ignore them altogether.
For instance, Westney (1994) has observed that in pedagogical grammars: "[T]ime reference is treated as dominant and other uses are simply appended" (ibid.: 79). Riddle (1986) notes that most pedagogical texts ignore the uses of tense to signal intimacy, salience, and attenuation.
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/vyv/Exper ... eaning.pdf
*My emphasis.
.