culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

METAPHORICAL THOUGHT IN CULTURE:
THE ISSUE OF TIME IN ROMANIAN
are manifest in culture and expressed, should lead to the appearance of universal
collocations 11 .
Broadly speaking, scholars’ views about time, its conceptualization and
linguistic expression, can be grouped in three distinct classes. First, there are
scholars who have proposed experiential bases for spatial construals of time
(Lakoff, 1993; Alverson, 1994; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). These hypothesized
bases lie in shared bodily experience of space and its correlation with temporal
experience, and thus offer a potentially universal basis for spatiotemporal
metaphors.
Second, there are other scholars who believe that cultures vary radically in
their understandings of time (e.g. Dahl 1995). Relative to this, Nunez and
Sweetser (2006) rightly maintain that these two viewpoints are not necessarily
incompatible: Humans often have more than one construal of a given complex
domain, even in mathematics (for examples of multiple construals in arithmetic,
calculus, and set theory, see Lakoff & Núñez, 1997), so it would be perfectly
possible for there to be both some very culture-specific and some universal
models of time.
Third, there are well-balanced views for the interpretation of the
conceptual metaphors that we find most adequate for understanding time crossculturally
and cross-linguistically. Kövecses (2006), in his Language, Mind and
Culture, outlines several reasons for his theory of variation and universality.
Concerning the universality of conceptual metaphors, the technique
adopted by Kövecses (2006: 156) is that of finding identical or similar
conceptual metaphors through several unrelated languages 12 . Thus, he shows
that ‘the universality or near-universality of metaphor implies that the realization
of metaphor occurs in all or most of the languages of the world (155-157).
Reasons for this phenomenon have been attributed to (1) similar conceptual
metaphors evolving ‘by accident’ in the respective languages. It may also have
occurred by (2) languages borrowing from one another or the implication of (3)
some sort of universal motivation or understanding that is realized in the
metaphors of the cultures).
According to Evans (2003: 212), the putative universality in the Moving
Time and the Moving Ego models is determined by lexical concepts such as
Duration (E. Time crawls by when you’re bored; R. Timpul trece greu când eşti
plictisit), Temporal Moment (E. The time for a decision has arrived; R. A sosit
momentul să luăm hotărâre) and Temporal Event (E. His time has come; R. I s-a
apropiat ceasul) which participate in the complex Moving Time and Moving
Ego models. He also calls these lexical concepts ‘primary temporal concepts’
and contrasts them with ‘secondary temporal concepts’, such as the Matrix
Sense (E. Time goes on forever; R. Timpul trece), the Commodity Sense (E.
They bought more advertising time; R Nu vrea să şi piarda timpul “He has no
time to lose”), the Time-Measurement Sense (E. We get paid double-timed
during the holidays) which appear to be more culture-specific: “While aspects of
the two cognitive models under consideration are likely to be universal, given
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