culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

MARIANA NEAGU
stories have been passed down from generation to generation where the
younger generations, closer to the present, are at the bottom and described as
descendant and the older generations are at the top and described as ascendant.
Another European language, French, also has up–down metaphors that relate to
temporal structure. Núñez and Sweetser (2006) exemplify with the French
historical terms basse antiquité (Late Antiquity, lit. “low antiquity”) and bas
moyen age (lit. “low middle ages”), technical phrases used by historians to refer
to the same period, the later medieval period. The French usages seem related to
a metaphor such as EARLIER IS HIGHER, LATER IS LOWER; whereas the
English usage (i.e. High Middle Ages) seems related to the construal of the later
medieval period as culturally and intellectually closer to the following
Renaissance, a period of “high” culture (GREATER CULTURAL
ACHIEVEMENT IS GREATER HEIGHT).
2.2 The ‘Passing’ of Time in Psychology. Types of Durational Experiences.
The social psychologist Michael Flaherty (1999) argues that there are two
distinct kinds of durational experiences which are associated with patterns of
attending to particular stimulus arrays, and our level of familiarity with
particular sorts of events. The first type, protracted duration, occurs when we
experience events such as the first day drive to work which appears to take an
extended period of time as we carefully pay attention to the details of the route,
etc. However, once mastered, after a few weeks or months, the same drive
appears to go by “in a flash” due to the phenomenon of routine complexity).
This second type of durational experience is called temporal compression:
Time crawls by when you have nothing to do. (protracted duration)
Time flies when you’re having fun. (temporal compression)
Evans (2003) elaborates on the category of Duration and
identifies/determines it as the Sanctioning Sense in the semantic network for
time: “…The Duration Sense constitutes the Sanctioning Sense for the semantic
network of time. The sanctioning sense is held to constitute the lexical concept
which language users take to be the core or primary meaning associated with the
lexeme time”. He also considers conventional patterns in the elaboration of the
two variants of the Duration Sense, i.e. the Protracted Duration Sense and the
Temporal Compression sense
2.3 The Structural Metaphor TIME IS MOTION IN SPACE
Cognitively, the motion schema has “all the qualifications a schema
should have to serve as a source domain of a metaphor: it is (a) pervasive in
experience, (b) well-understood because it is pervasive, (c) well-structured, (d)
simply structured, and (e) emergent and well-demarcated for these reasons.
(Lakoff 1987: 278). More specifically, motion in space is a major source
domain in structuring our thinking about a wide range of abstract concepts such
as change of state (Mary fell in love), ideas (An idea came to/ran through his
mind), external events (How are things going?), actions (Let’s move on) forces
(John was pushed for money) and time (Hours crawl by) across different
languages of the world.
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