Before and after: Relations of anteriority and posteriority along ‘paths’ of conceptual structure

The paper deals with the way events are ordered in a sequence with respect to each other and with respect to the speaker. When ordered with respect to each other, one event serves as the temporal reference point for establishing mental contact with another event, the target. Taking the speaker as the reference point, events are organized on the time line around the speaker and the present moment of speaking (speech time) from which the speaker looks back at past time and forwards at future time. The event-ordering relations are studied by before and after in physical, temporal and abstract space. Moreover, the variety of meanings of before and after is not only motivated by the spatial and nonspatial domains they extend to, but also by the different patterns and modifications of image schemas.