Time, space and events in language and cognition

What is it about?

We propose an event-based account of the cognitive and linguistic representation of time and temporal relations. Human beings differ from non-human animals in entertaining and communicating elaborate detached (as opposed to cued) event representations and temporal relational schemas. We distinguish deictically based (D-time) from sequentially based (S-time) representations, identifying these with the philosophical categories of A-series and B-series time. On the basis of crosslinguistic data, we claim that all cultures employ both D-time and S-time representations. We outline a cognitive model of event structure, emphasizing that this does not entail an explicit, separate representation of a time dimension. We propose that the notion of an event-independent, metric “time as such” is not universal, but a cultural and historical construction based on cognitive technologies for measuring time intervals. We critically examine claims that time is universally conceptualized in terms of spatial metaphors, and hypothesize that systematic space-time metaphor is only found in languages and cultures that have constructed the notion of time as a separate dimension. We emphasize the importance of distinguishing what is universal from what is variable in cultural and linguistic representations of time, and speculate on the general implications of an event-based understanding of time.

Featured Image

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This article challenges two widely-held assumptions: (a) that time needs to be represented as an independent vector in event representations; (b) that linguistic concepts of time are metaphorically based on spatial concepots in all languages.