culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

MARIANA NEAGU
environment, geopolitical circumstances, historical events and also by religious
beliefs.
Linguistic evidence collected from famous Romanian writers and from
colloquial Romanian indicates that linguistic expressions of motion metaphors of
time may be influenced or shaped by cultural-ideological traits and assumptions
characterizing our culture. With this we suggest that metaphors (both conceptual
and linguistic) may be not only cognitively but also culturally motivated.
1. For example, people from English speaking cultures like to plan and feel outraged when life
intervenes. But if you can’t see the future, there seems less point in planning.
2. This is what Gentner (20 01) found after he made an experiment that roughly consisted in
asking commonsense time questions to passengers at the O’Hare airport (Gentner 2001):
“It seems that the O'Hare participants preferred to reason with the ego-moving metaphor. This
observation, together with the finding in Experiments 1 and 2 that subjects took longer to
respond to time-moving metaphors than to ego-moving metaphors suggests that the egomoving
metaphor is somehow easier or more natural for English speakers. The most obvious
advantage of the ego-moving framework is that it requires fewer distinct conceptual points.
Statements in the ego-moving metaphor express the temporal relationship between an event and
an observer (e.g., "We are approaching the holidays") and therefore can be represented as two
points on a time-line: [Past . . . us [(observer) . . . holidays . . . Future]. Statements using the
time-moving metaphor, in contrast, typically express the temporal relationship between two
events from the point of view of an observer '(e.g., "Spring will come after winter"). In this
case, three time points must be represented, one each for event 1, event 2 and the observer:
Past… winter… (observer)… spring… Future]. The fact that the time-moving metaphor is
typically a three-term relation whereas the ego-moving metaphor is typically a two-term
relation probably contributes to the greater processing difficulty of time-moving metaphors”.
(219)
3. It is also claimed that in Classical Greek the past was in front and the future behind which,
however, no longer applies to Modern Greek.
4. The notion of horizontal motion characterizes the Moving Time Metaphor that we will discuss
in section 2.2.
5. In the case of the conceptual metaphor CHANGE IS MOTION spatial SOURCE and GOAL correspond
to the states before and after the transition while spatial PATH corresponds to the transitional phase
of a state, and spatial direction may be related to the “direction” of a change of state. (see Radden
1996: 425)
6. These correspondences are referred to as mappings, i.e. the presupposed, underlying knowledge
used when speaking about the different domains. (Kövecses 2002: 6).
7. While some linguists such as Evans, prefer the phrase ‘cognitive models’, some other scholars,
such as Lakoff (1999) and Moore (2006), favour the phrase ‘general metaphors for time’.
8. As can be noticed, Moore (2006) uses the terms ‘source frame’ and ‘target frame’ instead of
source and target domain. He argues that motion metaphors of time should be characterized as a
mapping across frames, as opposed to metonymy which is a ‘within frame mapping’. Therefore,
the notion of frame can be used to distinguish between a space-to-time metonymy and a space-totime
metaphor. For example, in Pat got the well ahead of Kim the experience of motion entails a
correlated and proportional experience of time; Pat and Kim both take a single path to the well, Pat
is ahead of Kim on the path when she gets to the well and also she gets there first. Pat’s position
on the path stands metonymically for her time of arrival. The position of each entity on the path
(Pat and Kim) maps onto the time of arrival of that entity. As position and time of arrival are both
associated with elements of the frame of ordered motion, it is clear that is a within frame mapping,
i.e. a metonymy.
9. See Mircea Vulcănescu (1991: 135).
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