Time Is Space
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In a theory first posited by Edward Sapir, and later by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, the structure of a language allows people to classify and understand their experiences and, consequentially, language is directly correlated with its speaker’s perception of the world (Danesi 2004: 14). Stemming from this proposal, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote Metaphors We Live By in which they provided evidence that metaphorical meanings are used systematically to link abstract concepts to more concrete concepts (107). They posited that humans create image schemas which act as cognitive templates that can be used to process abstract ideas. These image schemas are used in conceptual metaphors such as [people are animals] as in That girl is a fox or [life is a journey] as in I’m in a dead-end job. As first explored by Sapir and Whorf and later expanded by Lakoff and Johnson, I seek to show the conceptual metaphor [time is space] as evidence of the role of language in its speaker’s perception of abstract temporal concepts. This thesis can be supported through the applications of the Metaphoric Mapping Theory, Boroditsky’s Metaphoric Structuring View, and by evaluating the dominant uses of spatial metaphors to understand abstract concepts.
As originally described by Lakoff, the Metaphoric Mapping Theory treats metaphor as a powerful computational ability that defines human cognition in its linking of similar relational structures of different conceptual domains (Kemmerer 2005: 798). In its application to the metaphor [time is space], the abstract concept of time is associated with a person’s perceived place in time. Spatial terms are more concrete and provide a structure in which to describe time. Linguists are split in this viewpoint; a strong view and a weak view of this theory are presented. The strong view insists that spatial terms are always related to time structure (798). The weak view holds that temporal meanings do not necessarily depend on the [time is space] metaphor (799). Both views admit that humans’ experiential concepts are connected in some metaphorical way to understanding abstract domains. In this way, experiential domains are related to abstract domains in source-to-target metaphor mapping (Boroditsky 2000: 2). In [time is space], time serves as the base, or target domain; space is the vehicle of the metaphor and is called the source domain (Danesi 2004: 106).
Boroditsky expands on Lakoff’s Metaphoric Representation View in her Metaphoric Structuring View. This view posits that metaphors are used to structure abstract domains using terms from more concrete domains with (Boroditsky 2000: 3). Commonly, in the English language directional terms are used in descriptions of time, including the directional terms ahead/behind and up/ down. Time is usually conceived of as a continual, unidirectional entity to which we are inevitably subjected (4). Examples showing this perception of time with applied spatial terms include I’m looking forward to tomorrow and She was ahead of her time. These space-domain applications invoke spatial schemas which provide a relational structure to place events in time (4). There are two main types of dominant spatial metaphors: ego-moving metaphors and time-moving metaphors. Depending upon the person’s perceived reference point, ego-moving metaphors see themselves as moving along a timeline towards the future whereas time-moving metaphors see the timeline as a river, or a continuous belt where they are standing stationary (5). As in English, ego-moving puts the future in “front” as in some future place to which we are headed; oppositely, time-moving metaphors perceive events as moving past them from the future to the past, where the past would be in the front. All of these structures can be easily observed in everyday language systems.
In English, people locate the past behind them and the future in front of them. In this, speakers spatialize time along the back-front axis of metaphorical mapping (Santiago 2007: 512). This horizontal back-front axis is connected with physical movement and time can be seen as moving along a path (512). Writing structures of languages have been shown to affect temporal concepts in semantic memory (512). A linear effect of left-to-right was shown in American children with the English writing format of left-to-right, while Arab children showed a similar effect from right-to-left as suggests their writing culture (513). This linear map of time as moving left-to-right has been shown to cause literate users of such languages to map past time onto left space and future time onto right space (513). This also parallels the established [SNARC] effect which links space-number association to one’s writing direction (513). It is universal that the source of temporal vocabulary in vocabularies is experiential spatial vocabulary (Sweetser 1992: 710). Supporting this remark, children have been shown to regularly learn spatial terms before they can use these terms for temporal uses (711). An example of this is a child mistakenly declaring an event “behind dinner” instead of “after dinner” (711). Using spatial terms to refer to abstract time allows humans to conceive and internalize an unexplainable concept. The use of metaphorical concepts shapes time as ongoing and inevitable — allowing humans to process the idea of time as part of their everyday experience. It permits people to organize life’s activities in terms of a conceivable timeline in space. All of these help to define abstract qualities of time in terms of experiential topics.
Within this 21st century of technology advancements and increased dependability on machines, English’s spatial metaphors are used to refer to the virtual space called the World Wide Web. Spatial terminology for using the Internet is further evidence for language’s dependent use of conceptual metaphors to structure the abstract. In a study conducted by Maglio and Barrett, participants were asked various questions about controlled Internet uses and, on a second day, were required to recall previously visited websites (Maglio 2003: 156). Their evidence showed participants’ reliance on “key nodes,” or basic “anchor points” along their path to their