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Ebook An introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics: Part 2

Semantics is the study of the “toolkit” for meaning: knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of the language and in its patterns for building more elaborate meanings, up to the level of sentence meanings. Pragmatics is concerned with the use of these tools in meaningful communication. Pragmatics is about the interaction of semantic knowledge with our knowledge of the world, taking into account contexts of use. The following is part 2 of the ebook "An introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics", inviting you to refer. | 6 Tense and aspect Overview This chapter is about how English grammar allows us to locate events in time tense in relation to the time of speaking or writing and about grammatical signals regarding the sender s notions of how an event is distributed in time aspect for instance is it viewed as ongoing or repeated or characterised as compressed to a point Example 6.1 from an article1 by Andrew O Hagan shows tense and aspect being used together to convey meaning. 6.1 When I told people I was spending time with farmers they d say how can you stand it they just complain all day and they ve always got their hand out. Anyone who knows English can understand the sentence. I would like to unpack some of what goes into understanding it. This is going to be a bit laborious but is worth doing to reveal the level of intricacy there is in grammatical facets of communication connected with time. Let us imagine ourselves at the time when Andrew O Hagan wrote 6.1 . Told is the past simple form of the verb tell. The first word in the two-part labels that I will use always represents tense so told is a past tense form. The second component denotes aspect and simple means that neither of the special aspectual meanings to be discussed later is involved. Other tenses and aspects are going to be introduced soon. The past simple indicates that he told people . before the time when he wrote the material quoted in 6.1 . Note that although tense is marked on the verb it is the whole event - or more likely series of events -described by the clause I told people . that is located in the time before the time of writing. Moving on in 6.1 was spending is in a form called past progressive. When tense is marked in a verb group it goes on the first element in the sequence. The form was in contrast to am is what makes was spending past. Progressive aspect is marked by the combination of the auxiliary 93 94 AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS BE be am is are was or were in front of the