Much more than money: Conceptual integration and the materialization of time

Fecha de publicación: 25-ago-2013 11:08:18

How do we conceptualize time as something material that we can count, measure, even buy and sell? How widespread are the cognitive recipes for thinking about time as something tangible? How do they work? How are they exploited by literature, for creating powerful aesthetic and affective meanings? Are the same conceptual templates also used by the Social Sciences that study time concepts and the role of time in human thought?

Time metaphors have long been a central topic in cognitive linguistics. In recent research with Ursina Teuscher, we analyzed patterns of conceptual mappings shared by Michael Ende’s children's novel about time, the best-seller Momo. There we found a bank of time, an organized mafia of men in gray that exploits people's fears to steal their time, the hour-lilies, beautiful flowers that constitute the substance of our lives, and many more. We compared the conceptual templates at work in these literary fantasies with examples of time conceptualization from psychology, sociology, economics, conventional language, and real social practices. We studied three major mappings in the materialization of time: time as money in relation with time banking, time units as objects produced by an internal clock, and time supply.

We showed that binary projections between experiential domains are not enough to model the complexity of meaning construction in these widely successful examples. To account for the intricacies of time materialization in context, we use generic integration templates, models for conceptual templates based on Fauconnier and Turner’s Blending Theory. The interplay of such detailed patterns with pragmatic and cultural factors, including diachronic aspects, is crucial to identify the cognitive models at work, and the factors that guide their instantiations as a variety of surface products. Rather than TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS A SUBSTANCE, or TIME IS A FLUID, we found that more intricate and flexible templates for integrating conceptual frames could be more useful for analyzing the complexities of meaning construction underlying all these examples. The basic scene/frame of joint manipulation of objects and substances seems to be providing the core structure on which varied patterns for materializing time are built.

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