Cognitive Semantics : Meaning and Cognition

SPACE AND TIME 147
temporal sense (e.g. The concert went from midnight to 4 am) share a feature:
both are based on perception of (concrete or abstract) motion of a mover
making contact with an ordered series of locations/points in time, i.e. the
component states of the process are distributed through a continuous span of
time, or put differently, both sentences describe processes taking place in time.
The difference between the two is that in the primarily temporal expression
time serves as the cognitive domain of the relation between the concert and the
period from midnight to 4 am; each component state is a relation between the
mover and a point in time. In the primarily spatial use of go, each component
state is a relation between a mover and a location. Can we then claim that the
spatial domain is more basic than the temporal domain and that, as a consequence,
the use of go in The concert went from midnight to 4 am is metaphorical?
Langacker seems to think so when he claims that physical movement
through space is the prototypical case of the schematic concept of motion
shared by the two examples (1991: 156). He claims that, in the sentence where
go has a primarily temporal meaning, the speaker/conceptualizer ‘traces mentally
along the path in order to situate the process in relation to a reference
point’ (1991: 332). But in They went from Cambridge to London, the conceptualizer
also necessarily traces mentally along the path, since there is no other
way to scan the miles of land in the time it takes to understand the sentence.
What about expressions used prototypically to express time? Are they
ever used to express temporal relations? In a study of how people describe the
layout of their flats, Linde and Labov (1975) found that the overwhelming
majority of the descriptions were organized as tours of the flats. Very few
descriptions were maps seen from a bird’s perspective (I’d say it’s laid out in
a huge square pattern, broken down into four units...). The imaginary tours
began at the front door and the descriptions then provided a minimal set of
paths by which each room could be entered. There were two basic types of
tours: the static type (to the right, straight ahead of you, off of the X) and the
mobile type (you keep walking straight ahead, now if you turn right) (Linde &
Labov 1975: 930). The descriptions of the flats emphasize that the static vs.
dynamic opposition is also fundamental to spatial descriptions.
Langacker’s model demonstrates that it is possible to distinguish primarily
spatial from primarily temporal contextualizations of linguistic expressions.
The use of before in He stood before the throne expresses primarily a
spatial relation; in He heard the scream before the shot, before expresses a
primarily temporal relation. What is less obvious, however, is the “prototypi-