In Academic English, such sentence pattern as “Chomsky (1957) argues that …” is a common way of reporting other researchers’ perspectives. The simple present tense is usually chosen in these sentences though the actual actions predicated by the reporting verbs may happen in the past. This paper argues that the subject “author (publication year)” in these sentences has developed into a grammatical construction, and that there is a metonymic mechanism in such a construction, i.e., PRODUCER FOR PRODUCT. It is proposed that this metonymic mechanism can serve as the motivation for the choice of the simple present tense of the reporting verbs in the English academic discourse.