[摘 要]

“语篇”一词在语言学范畴中指“任何一种书面或口头形式的篇章，无论长短，所组成的一个整体”。一个语篇具有衔接所构成的篇章结构，这就是区别它是否是语篇的重要因素（Halliday and Hasan 1976:2）。因此，“衔接”是分析语篇中最基础、也是最重要的概念。
    国内和国外的许多学者、专家在19世纪60年代就开始对“语篇衔接”感兴趣，并且已经有很多关于这一课题的研究，大多数学者主要研究语篇结构的词汇和语法衔接手段。本文将研究英语时态在英文小说中的作用，并以艾丽斯·沃克的《祖母的日常用品》为例进行分析，来证明英语时态在语篇衔接中的重要性及不同时态的不同作用。

[关键字] 英语时态；语篇特征； 衔接

Abstract:

The word “text” is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole. A text has texture, which is provided by the cohesive relations, and this is what distinguishes it from something that is not a text” (Halliday and Hasan 1976:2). [1] Therefore, “cohesion” is one of the most basic concepts and also an important topic to study in text analysis.
    Scholars both at home and abroad have become interested in textual cohesion since the 1960’s, and a lot of researches on this topic have been done, most of them concentrated on a few obvious lexical and grammatical cohesive devices of the surface structure. This thesis will analyze the cohesive function of English tenses in narrative texts and to show the various effects of different tenses.

Key words: English tense; discourse features; cohesion in text

1 Introduction:
    In the early age of English study, Chinese students know to use different tenses to describe different events that take place in different periods. Many of them suppose that “time” is the same concept in English and Chinese, so it is easy for them to learn how to apply different English tenses in their writing if they can master the changeable features of English verbs in different tenses and the typical temporal adverbial for each tense. However, many students use limit means while expressing in their writings, and they usually choose or switch tenses blindly for each sentence among one article. There is no mistake in a single sentence; even there is no difference in using simple present tense or present perfect tense for a single tense. But when we deal with the sentences out of the contextual point of view, we could conclude that the usage of tense is disorganized, and the relation between each sentence is also not clearly. The main reason is that grammar rules teaching and practicing are concerned in one single sentence. This teaching way requires the students to practice the changeable verb features and master the use of adverbs. The traditional teaching and studying ways have ignored to use lexical ways to present the relations between each sentence.