The Structure of Time: Language, Meaning and Temporal Cognition (review)

‘Everyone knows about time. We have spare time, we gain time, we lose time. We mark time, keep time, play for time, but in the end time waits for no one. You can tell the time from a clock, but few people can handle the really tricky time question’ (Arnold 2002:5, italics added). So what can we learn from this book?

Reading the book was a bit like untying a ball of knots one after the other until, by Ch. 5, I was able to follow a much smoother line of thought and explanation. The book has three parts: orientation, concepts for time, and models for time.

The books starts with an explanation of what physicists and philosophers call the realist or absolutist view of time, that there is ‘true’ time, a time that actually exists in a physical sense and agrees with the laws of nature. Evans calls this the ‘common-place view of time’. This is only one way that physicists conceptualize time, though there are several others (see Callender & Edney 2001). E explains that this view of time seems to be contradicted in two ways: (i) by our feeling that time is elusive and imperceptible, and (ii) because there does not appear to be a neurological apparatus that enables us to perceive global time (4). This gives rise to what he calls the metaphysical problem of time, which can be summarized as: time exists and does not exist at the same time. His book intends to refute the physicalist view of time but also the view that time is an abstraction derived from comparing events, a view espoused by some cognitive linguists. E’s own hypothesis is that time is neither a physical entity nor an abstraction, but that our awareness of time is based on perceptual processes and phenomenological experience, that temporality is fundamentally internal, although derived from responses to the external world of sensory experience. E uses the terms ‘time’ and ‘temporality’ interchangeably. It might have been helpful to assign them different roles, especially as E seems to vacillate in his argumentation between criticizing and/or espousing views put forward by those who have tried to fathom the ‘nature of time’ and those that have tried to fathom the ‘nature of the perception of time’ or the ‘nature of the experience of time’. In this context a distinction between the experience of temporality and time ‘out there’ (whatever it might be) is essential (see p. 8, where E writes: ‘our experience of time cannot be equated with an objectively real entity inhering in the world “out there”’—no it cannot because it is an experience).

‘The ultimate goal of this book is to establish the nature and structure of time, in essence to resolve the metaphysical problem’ (5). To do this E tackles the linguistic problem of time. By uncovering the structure of concepts of time (through a study of the various senses the lexeme time has acquired in English) E hopes to shed light on the structure of time itself—a rather big and perhaps confounded claim. E argues furthermore that ‘as language reflects conceptual structure in important ways, it accordingly represents a crucial window into the human conceptual system’ (5)—a rather circular argument.

Like all cognitive linguists, E looks at meaning through the lenses of conceptualization, cognition, and ultimately embodiment, in this case neurologically based temporal and perceptual processes. Following Ronald Langacker, language is regarded as a symbolic process whereby a physical symbol is paired with a meaning element or concept. E is particularly interested in one subset of concepts, namely lexical concepts. Meaning and conceptualization are collapsed in this view. This approach normally overlooks the social dimension of ‘meaning’ (which might shed light on how this rather miraculous ‘pairing’ happens), but E later addresses this issue. Those who believe in the ‘primacy of pragmatics’ might want to argue that meaning does not exist—it happens in social interaction and in time. The...