Unweaving the embodied nature of English temporal prepositions
The case of at
The metaphor
time is space (
Lakoff & Johnson 1999) and the
pervasiveness of metaphor and image-schematic structure in human conceptualization (
Johnson 1987;
Hampe 2005) have been widely accepted among cognitive scientists as constructs that help
explain non-spatial and temporal linguistic constructions. However, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) might not be the whole story. While it
is acceptable that moments in time can be construed as being analogous to points in space as in utterances such as
at
the corner vs.
at 2:30, there seems to be much more
temporal cognition than
previously thought. It turns out that time exhibits its own structure (following
Evans 2004,
2013;
Galton 2011) that is based on transience. This
idea has made some scholars support the weak version of CMT which posits that the temporal meaning of prepositions is represented and
processed independently of the corresponding spatial meanings (see
Kemmerer 2005 for such a
view). The present article supports the idea that spatial and temporal structures complement each other in order to achieve temporal
conceptions. This is indeed a conceptual pattern showed by the English preposition
at that makes use of an extrinsic
temporal reference to activate its temporal semantics. To analyze the different temporal realizations that
at may have, the
paper aims to identify the topological structure that underlies the
conceptual basis of this preposition. This allows us to
appreciate how the spatio-conceptual structure of
at partially structures temporal conceptions. The paper also identifies
the nature of the temporal structure that is involved in temporal realizations. The article concludes with some remarks, among them the
pivotal role of the schematic temporal structure that is captured by the extrinsic temporal reference, and the role of conceptual metaphor
in underdetermining temporal thinking.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 2.1Space versus time in cognitive linguistics
- 2.2Theories and constructs
- 3.Analysis
- 3.1Temporal lexical concepts for at
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
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Morras, Javier
2022.
Semantic Parameters, Cognitive Models, and Mental Units.
Cognitive Semantics 8:1
► pp. 1 ff.
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
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