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- Title
Uncertain futures: what light can metaphor shed upon the conceptualisation of time?
- Authors
WALLINGTON, Alan
- Abstract
This paper examines a number of recent claims concerning languages which appear to use radically different means from English to structure temporal information metaphorically in terms of space and movement through space. It argues that if one distinguishes between events, clock or calendar times and how individuals might relate to, or plan for, an event, then a more nuanced analysis is possible, and the languages are not as different as might appear superficially. It is argued that concepts involving relations between individuals and future events are not directly structured in terms of space. Instead, people place reified events in different spatial locations in order to describe their degree of epistemic detachment from the event. This brings metaphorical means of conveying the future into line with recent work on tense, aspect and modality, which also argue for a role for planning and epistemic modality in the analysis of temporal phenomena.
- Subjects
LANGUAGE &; languages; LINGUISTIC analysis; MODALITY (Linguistics); EGO (Psychology); EPISTEMIC logic
- Publication
Cahiers Chronos, 2015, Vol 27, p25
- ISSN
1384-5357
- Publication type
Article