Lexical concepts for TIME
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C3P79
2025-12-04
22
Lexical concepts for TIME
In his discussion of lexical concepts for TIME, Evans (2004a) distinguishes between primary lexical concepts and secondary lexical concepts. Primary lexical concepts are those that relate to common aspects of human cognitive processing. In other words, they relate to the experiences of time that we mentioned above: duration, simultaneity, temporal ‘point’ or moment, ‘now’ and so on. Because experiences of this kind can be traced to underlying perceptual mechanisms and processes, it follows that concepts of this kind are likely to be more common in the languages of the world, and where they occur, to be more similar across languages. In contrast, secondary lexical concepts are cultural constructs and thus may often be culture specific. A good example of this is the concept of TIME as a valuable commodity, which can be bought and sold, just like concrete physical merchandise. This concept, while present in the languages of the industrialised world, is entirely absent in the languages of many non-industrialised cultures. Since our focus here is on cross-linguistically robust patterns of lexical concepts for TIME, we limit the discussion in this section to primary lexical concepts.
In order to give an illustration of some of the primary lexical concepts for TIME, we will consider the English lexical item time. This form encodes four primary lexical concepts which show up in different contexts. The lexical concepts we will address are DURATION, MOMENT, EVENT and INSTANCE.
Lexical concept: DURATION
The concept of DURATION has two variants that relate to two distinct subjective experiences. The first is called protracted duration and relates to the experience that time is proceeding more slowly than usual:
window, and turn the wheel, hand over hand, toward the right. I also [noticed] that the car was a brown Olds. I heard the screeching sound from my tires and knew . . . that we were going to hit . . . I wondered what my parents were going to say, if they would be mad, where my boyfriend was, and most of all, would it hurt . . . After it was over, I realized what a short time it was to think so many thoughts, but, while it was happening, there was more than enough time. It only took about ten or fifteen seconds for us to hit, but it certainly felt like ten or fifteen minutes. (Flaherty 1999: 52)
Protracted duration is caused by a heightened awareness of a particular stimulus array, either because the interval experienced is ‘empty’, as in (23), or because the interval is very ‘full’ due to a great deal being experienced in a short space of time. This is illustrated in (24), which relates a near-death experience involving a car crash.
The second variant of DURATION is called temporal compression. This is when we experience time proceeding more quickly than usual, and is most often associated with our experience of routine behaviours which we carry out effortlessly without much attention to the task at hand. Evidence that temporal compression is encoded in language comes from examples like (25)–(27).
Lexical concept: MOMENT
Another aspect of our temporal experience is the ability to assess time in terms of discrete moments. This experience is also reflected in language. Consider examples (28)–(29).
Each of the uses of time in these examples could be paraphrased by the expression moment. In these examples, TIME is conceptualised not in terms of an interval, whose duration can be assessed, but instead as a discrete point.
Lexical concept: EVENT
A third conceptualisation of TIME relates to the notion of an EVENT. This is an occurrence of some kind. Evans (2004a) suggests that events derive, at the perceptual level, from temporal processing, which binds particular occurrences into a temporally framed unity: a ‘window’ or ‘time slot’. Consider examples (30)–(31).
In each of these examples a particular event, childbirth and death respectively, is lexicalised by time. This suggests that the conceptualisation of an event is closely tied up with temporal experience.
Lexical concept: INSTANCE
The final temporal lexical concept we will consider is INSTANCE. This concept underlies the fact that temporal events can be enumerated, which entails that distinct events can be seen as instances or examples of the ‘same’ event.
In this example, time refers not to four distinct moments, but to a fourth instance of the ‘improvement’ event. This example provides linguistic evidence that separate temporal events can be related to one another and ‘counted’ as distinct instances of a single event type.
Temporal aspects of an event: Christmas
Now let’s consider a word other than time which also exhibits these distinct aspects of temporal experience. Consider the word Christmas. This relates to a particular kind of temporal event: the kind that is framed (or understood) with respect to the calendar. That is, Christmas is a festival that takes place at the same time each year, traditionally on the 25th of December. While the festival of Christmas is a cultural construct – deriving from the Christian tradition – the expression Christmas can be used in contexts that exhibit the same dimensions of temporal experience we described above for the expression time: dimensions that appear to derive from our cognitive abilities, and therefore from pre-linguistic experience of time. Consider examples (33)–(36). In example (33), the temporal event Christmas is experienced in terms of protracted duration and thus ‘feels’ as if it’s proceeding more slowly than on previous occasions:
The elaboration of temporal lexical concepts
One of the most striking ways in which lexical concepts for TIME are elaborated is in terms of motion. For example, it is almost impossible to talk about time without using words like approach, arrive, come, go, pass and so on. Of course, time is not a physical object that can literally undergo motion. Yet, in languages as diverse as Wolof (a Niger-Congo language spoken in West Africa), Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and English, lexical concepts for TIME are systematically structured in terms of motion. Consider examples (37)–(40).
However, given the specific nature of the lexical concepts we have discussed, it is likely that the range of motion types that languages can rely upon to elaborate specific lexical concepts for TIME will be relatively constrained. For instance, in English, protracted duration can only be elaborated in terms of motion events that involve slow motion or absence of motion:
Both these kinds of elaboration contrast with the way in which the lexical concepts EVENT and MOMENT are structured. These concepts involve motion directed towards a particular locus of experience or deictic centre (usually the speaker, from whose perspective the scene is viewed). As examples (43) and (44) show, this is revealed by expressions denoting movement towards the speaker, such as come, arrive, approach and so on. Moreover, motion of this kind usually terminates when it reaches the locus of experience.
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