Human Cognitive Processing (vols. 1–51, 1998–2015)

The Spatial Language of Time presents a crosslinguistically valid state-of-the-art analysis of space-to-time metaphors, using data mostly from English and Wolof (Africa) but additionally from Japanese and other languages. Metaphors are analyzed in terms of their most direct motivation by basic human experiences (Grady 1997a; Lakoff & Johnson 1980). This motivation explains the crosslinguistic appearance of certain metaphors, but does not say anything about temporal metaphor systems that deviate from the types documented here. Indeed, we observe interesting culture- and language-specific metaphor phenomena. Refining earlier treatments of temporal metaphor and adapting to temporal experience Levinson’s (2003) idea of frames of reference, the author proposes a contrast between perspective-neutral and perspective-specific frames of reference in temporal metaphor that has important crosslinguistic ramifications for the temporal semantics of FRONT/BEHIND expressions. This book refines the cognitive-linguistic approach to temporal metaphor by analyzing the extensive temporal structure in what has been considered the source domain of space, and showing how temporal metaphors can be better understood by downplaying the space-time dichotomy and analyzing metaphor structure in terms of conceptual frames. This book is of interest to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and others who may have wondered about relationships between space and time.

This volume offers novel insights into linguistic diversity in the domains of spatial and temporal reference, searching for uniformity amongst diversity. A number of authors discuss expression of dynamic spatial relations cross-linguistically in a vast range of typologically different languages such as Bezhta, French, Hinuq, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Serbian, and Spanish, among others. The contributions on linguistic expression of time all shed new light on pertinent questions regarding this cognitive domain, such as the hotly debated relationship between cross-linguistic differences in talking about time and universal principles of utterance interpretation, modelling temporal inference through aspectual interactions, as well as the complexity of the acquisition of tense-aspect relations in a second language.

The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Language, culture, and cognition (HCP 37) which discusses spatial and temporal constructs in human language, cognition, and culture in order to come closer to a better understanding of the interaction between shared and individual characteristics of language and culture that shape the way people interact with each other and exchange information about the spatio-temporal constructs that underlie their cognitive, social, and linguistic foundations.

An important tool for scientific study in any field is a formal language in which the phenomena can be described and hypotheses formulated. In this book a formal notation is developed for the description of the cognitive structure of arguments. The analyses based on this notation are more fine-grained than the analyses in previous attempts, and they are applicable not only to arguments but to all types of moves in a discourse. Further, the notational system provides a basis for the description of relations between arguments and the structure of the discourse as a whole. In the final chapter, some empirical studies of retention of arguments in memory and of précis writing are reported, based on hypotheses formulated in terms of the notational system.