A Pragma-linguistic Analysis of the English Present and Past Tenses

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.