Cognitive Semantics : Meaning and Cognition

136 ELISABETH ENGBERG-PEDERSEN
we see ‘his’ staying ‘there’ as part of a journey over a landscape where the
passage corresponding to ‘his’ time ‘there’ includes a vast (i.e. long) part of
the landscape.
Both Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Lakoff (1993) avoid including the
notion of ego or a specific point of view in their models in contrast with the
earlier models, the moving-ego vs. moving-time models. In many cases,
however, we have to reckon with the notion of ego — or a specific point of
view, since verbs such as English come are primarily deictic and denote
motion towards ego or some individual from whose point of view the events
are seen (Fillmore 1973). In (4a-b) time can be said to be assigned front-back
orientation simply because it is seen as moving, as pointed out by Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) and Lakoff (1993). But the direction of movement (come vs.
go) is determined by the point of view: time comes towards ego’s front and
goes away behind ego’s back.
What we have seen up to now is that all models for describing temporal
expressions in spoken languages are basically dynamic, no matter whether the
expressions are semantically static as in (1) and (5) or dynamic as in (2-4).
Time is seen as stationary with an individual moving as if over a landscape. Or
time is seen as an object moving, either independently of ego or a specific
point of view or in relation to ego.
Traugott (1978: 382) criticizes descriptions of temporal expressions in
terms of moving-ego and moving-time: according to her not all temporal
expressions are dynamic, and static temporal expressions should not be described
in terms of motion. Static temporal expressions such as the ones in (1)
use ego’s front-back orientation; here neither ego nor time are conceptualized
as moving.
As an alternative to the moving-time and the moving-ego models,
Traugott suggests an analysis using two different types of time lines: the time
line of tense and the time line of sequencing. By tense, Traugott means “the
semantic category that establishes the relationship which holds between the
time of the situation or event talked about and the time of utterance” (1978:
371), 3 while sequencing is the “ordering of events or situations talked about”
(1978: 372): “the time-reference of tense shifts with the ‘now’ of the speaker,
[but] the relative relation of two events does not” (1978: 379). Traugott’s
representation of the two time lines can be seen in Figure 3.
In Traugott’s description, the difference between tense and sequencing is
primarily that expressions of tense have a reference point described as [+Proxi-