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On the path of time: temporal motion in typological perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2020

MICHELE I. FEIST  and
SARAH E. DUFFY
MICHELE I. FEIST*
Affiliation:
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
SARAH E. DUFFY
Affiliation:
Northumbria University
*
Corresponding author: Michele I. Feist, feist@louisiana.edu
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Abstract

The Moving Ego and Moving Time metaphors have provided a fertile testing ground for the psychological reality of space–time metaphors. Despite this, little research has targeted the linguistic patterns used in these two mappings. To fill that gap, the current study uses corpus data to examine the use of motion verbs in two typologically different languages, English and Spanish. We first investigated the relative frequency of the two metaphors. Whereas we observed no difference in frequency in the Spanish data, our findings indicated that in English, Moving Time expressions are more prevalent than are Moving Ego expressions. Second, we focused on the patterns of use of the verbs themselves, asking whether well-known typological patterns in the expression of spatial motion would carry over to temporal motion. Specifically, we examined the frequencies of temporal uses of path and manner verbs in English and in Spanish. Contra the patterns observed in space, we observed a preference for path verbs in both languages, with this preference more strongly evident in English than in Spanish. In addition, our findings revealed greater use of motion verbs in temporal expressions in Spanish compared to English. These findings begin to outline constraints on the aspects of spatial conceptualization that are likely to be reused in the conceptualization of time.

Keywords

TimeSpaceMotionMetaphorMoving TimeMoving EgoPathManner
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , September 2020 , pp. 444 - 467
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Copyright
© UK Cognitive Linguistics Association, 2020

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this research was presented at the 12th International Conference on Researching and Applying Metaphor. We thank the audience for their thoughtful questions, and we thank Jan Edson Rodrigues Leite for his comments on the ideas presented here as well as the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

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