Linguistic Society of America

The Structure of Time: Language, Meaning and Temporal Cognition by Vyvyan Evans
Review by: Brigitte Nerlich
Language, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Jun., 2006), pp. 429-431
Published by: Linguistic Society of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4490167 .
Accessed: 28/12/2014 00:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 28 Dec 2014 00:07:25 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEWS 429

The structure of time: Language, meaning and temporal cognition. By VYVYANEVANS.

Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 287. ISBN 158811466X. $114 (Hb).
Reviewed by BRIGITTE NERLICH, University of Nottingham*
'Everyone knows about time. We have spare time, we gain time, we lose time. We marktime,
keep time,play for time, but in the end time waitsfor no one. You can tell the time from a clock,
but few people can handle the really tricky time question' (Arnold 2002:5, italics added). So
what can we learn from this book?
Reading the book was a bit like untying a ball of knots one after the other until, by Ch. 5, I
was able to follow a much smoother line of thought and explanation.The book has three parts:
orientation,concepts for time, and models for time.
The books starts with an explanation of what physicists and philosophers call the realist or
absolutist view of time, that there is 'true' time, a time that actually exists in a physical sense
and agrees with the laws of nature.Evans calls this the 'common-place view of time'. This is
only one way thatphysicists conceptualizetime, though there are several others (see Callender&
Edney 2001). E explains that this view of time seems to be contradictedin two ways: (i) by our
feeling that time is elusive and imperceptible, and (ii) because there does not appear to be a
neurological apparatusthat enables us to perceive global time (4). This gives rise to what he
calls the metaphysicalproblem of time, which can be summarizedas: time exists and does not
exist at the same time. His book intends to refute the physicalist view of time but also the view
that time is an abstractionderived from comparing events, a view espoused by some cognitive
linguists. E's own hypothesis is that time is neither a physical entity nor an abstraction,but that
our awareness of time is based on perceptualprocesses and phenomenological experience, that
temporalityis fundamentallyinternal,althoughderived from responses to the external world of
sensory experience. E uses the terms 'time' and 'temporality' interchangeably.It might have
been helpful to assign them differentroles, especially as E seems to vacillate in his argumentation
between criticizing and/or espousing views put forwardby those who have tried to fathom the
'natureof time' and those that have tried to fathom the 'natureof the perceptionof time' or the
'natureof the experienceof time'. In this context a distinctionbetween the experienceof temporal-
ity and time 'out there' (whatever it might be) is essential (see p. 8, where E writes: 'our
experience of time cannot be equated with an objectively real entity inheringin the world "out
there" '-no it cannot because it is an EXPERIENCE).
'The ultimate goal of this book is to establish the nature and structureof time, in essence to
resolve the metaphysicalproblem' (5). To do this E tackles the linguistic problem of time. By
uncovering the structureof concepts of time (througha study of the various senses the lexeme
time has acquiredin English)E hopes to shed light on the structureof time itself-a ratherbig and
perhapsconfoundedclaim. E arguesfurthermorethat 'as language reflects conceptualstructurein
importantways, it accordingly representsa crucial window into the human conceptual system'
(5)-a rathercircularargument.
Like all cognitive linguists, E looks at meaningthroughthe lenses of conceptualization,cogni-
tion, and ultimately embodiment, in this case neurologically based temporal and perceptual
processes. Following Ronald Langacker,language is regardedas a symbolic process whereby a
physical symbol is pairedwith a meaning element or concept. E is particularlyinterestedin one
subset of concepts, namely lexical concepts. Meaning and conceptualizationare collapsed in this
view. This approachnormally overlooks the social dimension of 'meaning' (which might shed
light on how this rathermiraculous 'pairing' happens), but E later addresses this issue. Those
who believe in the 'primacyof pragmatics'might want to argue that meaning does not exist-it
happensin social interactionand in time. The intersubjectivegenerationof meaning in time and
space leaves linguistic footprints,which, over time, become footpathsthroughconceptual space.
E writes: 'our ability to assess duration, and to distinguish discontinuous moments of time,

* I wouldlike to thank son Matthew, 13, for me to the booksabouttimequotedin

my age introducing
thisreview.

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 28 Dec 2014 00:07:25 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
430 VOLUME82, NUMBER2 (2006)
LANGUAGE,

ultimately facilitates our ability to coordinate social interaction' (253). Might that not be the
other way round?
In the second chapterof the book E argues for a subjectivephenomenological/perceptualbasis
of time (or rathertemporal experience)--especially of durationand the perceptualmoment (a
temporal mechanism that underpins perceptual processing). This mainly internal, subjective,
mental, and neurological basis for the elaborationof temporal concepts is challenged in Ch. 4
where meaning is linked to usage, behavior, evolution, and the experience of a physical world
'out there'-a world that is, however, 'constructed'by virtue of our evolutionary history and
the natureof our embodimentand physiology. E then argues that 'meanings (or lexical concepts)
are not primarilylinguistic, but ratherderive from perceptualanalysis and are hence redescribed
perceptions(i.e. they areembodied)' (53). But what is the process underpinningthis 'redescription
of perceptions' if not linguistic and social interaction?Again, this seems to be acknowledged
when E explains that 'the particularmeaning promptedfor by a lexeme will depend on its use
in context. Hence, interpretationcan never, on this account, be divorced from situated language
use' (54). Might it be that meaning is not just 'fundamentallya reflection of our embodied
experience' (55), but emerges and changes throughsocial experience of situatedlanguage use?
In Ch. 5 we reachthe most importantand exciting partof the book: the explorationof temporal
lexical concepts in English. While Ch. 5 deals with the conceptual-metaphorapproachto time,
Ch. 6 deals with a theory of word-meaningfor which E and his collaboratorAndreaTyler have
justly become famous: principledpolysemy. These two central chapters are followed by Part 2
of the book, which deals with concepts for time. This approachtries to account for polysemy
by studying the interactionbetween phenomenologicalexperience, an abstractprimarymeaning
componentaroundwhich senses cluster,and situatedlanguageuse. It avoids the polysemy fallacy
(i.e. the hypothetical multiplicationof senses) by establishing explicit criteria for determining
distinct senses versus contextual uses of a particularsense. It also provides explicit criteriafor
determiningthe sanctioningsense and explicitly articulatesthe inferencing strategies,processes,
and so on that give rise to the meaning of novel uses of a lexeme in context. These criteria are
the beginning of a plausible methodology leading to replicability of findings.
In Part 2 E explores the semantic network for time, that is, the various senses of time in the
English language. They are the duration sense (which is also the sanctioning sense, e.g. He
waited a long time), the moment sense (e.g. Whattime is it?), the matrix sense (e.g. Timeflows
onforever), the measurement-systemsense (e.g. Weget paid double time), the commodity sense
(e.g. Time is money), the instance sense (e.g. He did it 50 times in a row), the event sense (e.g.
The young woman's time approached), and the agentive sense (e.g. Timeis a great healer). The
four senses listed after the durationsense are derived from the durationsense and the last three
are derived from the moment sense and the matrix sense. The sanctioning sense is based on the
phenomenologically basic experience of duration.
The SanctioningSenseis held to constitutethe lexicalconceptwhichlanguageuserstaketo be the
coreor primary meaningassociatedwiththelexemetime.Fivecriteriawereusedto determinethatthe
DurationSenseconstitutes theSanctioning Sense.Thesewere(i) thecriterionof earliestattestedmean-
ing;(ii) thecriterionof predominance; (iii) the criterionof predictability;
(iv) thecriterionof cognitive
antecedents; andv) [sic] thecriterionof phenomenological experience.(121)
A chapter each is devoted to analyzing these senses and to justifying why they are to be
distinguishedand how they are derived from each other. The criteriathat allow E to make these
distinctions include the meaning criterion, that is, looking for evidence that we are dealing
with a distinct meaning, the concept-elaborationcriterion, which concerns the selectional or
collocational restrictions that apply to the lexeme time, and the grammaticalcriterion, which
concerns the natureof the grammaticalprofile adoptedby the nominal. All of these chaptersare
eminently readable,entirely evidence-based, and well argued.A nice illustrationfor an extended
metaphorbased on the commodity sense can be found on the back cover of Terry Pratchett's
Thief of time: 'Time is a resource. Everyone knows it has to be managed. And on Discworld
that is the job of the Monks of History, who store it and pump it from the places where it's
wasted (like underwater-how much time does a codfish need?) to places like cities where

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 28 Dec 2014 00:07:25 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEWS 431

there's never enough time'. Ch. 15 deals with the concepts of present, past, and future and
derives them from subjective experiences. It also deals with cross-cultural differences in the
conceptualizationof past, present, and future.
Part 3 is devoted to models of time. In Ch. 17 E argues that the commonplace conception of
time, introducedat the beginning of the book, derives from two complex cognitive models of
time, the moving-time model and the moving-ego model. In contradistinctionto other cognitive
linguists who regard them as 'primarymetaphors', E suggests (in line with other researchers;
see e.g. Radden2003) thatthese models areculturallyconstructedand entertaincomplex relations
with lexical concepts. In Ch. 18 he argues that English exhibits a third cognitive model of
temporality,which, again, is rathercomplex. This is the complex temporal-sequencemodel (see
also Ch. 15 devoted to past, present, and future). This is compared to the model exhibited by
the West African language Hausa. As with the comparison of the conceptualization of past,
present,and futurein Aymara,this is done to demonstratethat 'differentlanguages can elaborate
related concepts, or complex models, in slightly different ways, by virtue of different patterns
of elaborating available in the language, and different ways of construing similar humanly-
relevant scenes' (231).
In Ch. 19 we returnto time in modern physics and the theory of relativity before summing
up the results of this study and what they reveal about 'the structureof time'. E claims that 'time
has structure.It serves to distinguish the present from the past, and allows us to anticipatethe
future' (253). Again, a more careful distinction should have been made between 'time' in the
physical sense, the experience of 'temporality',and the lexeme time. The lexeme time certainly
has a lexical and conceptual structurethat has been uncovered in this book. But does this really
mean that 'time' has structure?
Despite some of the knots and tangles I have tried to unravel here, I highly recommend this
book to anybody interested in understandingthe concepts of time in English and to all those
who want to discover an exemplary model for the study of polysemy.
REFERENCES
ARNOLD, NICK.2002. The terrible truth about time. London: Scholastic Children's Books.
CALLENDER, CRAIG,and RALPH EDNEY.2001. Introducing time. Cambridge:Icon Books.
PRATCHETT,TERRY.2002. Thief of time. London: Corgi Books.
RADDEN,GUNTER. 2003. The metaphortime as space across languages. Ubersetzen,InterkulturelleKommuni-
kation,Spracherwerbund Sprachvermittlung-das Leben mit mehrerenSprachen:Festschriftfur Juli-
ane House zum 60. Geburtstag,ed. by Nicole Baumgarten,Claudia B6ttger, Markus Motz, and Julia
Probst,226-39. Zeitschriftfiir InterkulturellenFremdsprachenunterricht
8.2/3. Online:http://zif.spz.tu-
darmstadt.de/jg-08-2-3/beitrag/Raddenl .htm.

Institutefor the Study of Genetics, Biorisks, and Society

Law and Social Sciences Building
University of Nottingham
Nottingham,NG7 2RD
United Kingdom
[Brigitte.Nerlich@nottingham.ac.uk]

Endoclitics and the origins of Udi morphosyntax. By ALICEC. HARRIS.Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 299. ISBN 0199246335. $135 (Hb).
Reviewed by PHILIPS. LESOURDand PAULD. KROEBER, Indiana University
Alice Harris's book provides a meticulous demonstration of the reality of a grammatical
phenomenonwidely believed not to exist: endoclisis, or the placementof clitic morphemeswithin
the word to which they are attached.Correspondingly,it provides a clear challenge to proponents
of the lexicalist hypothesis, the widely accepted proposal that syntactic rules do not have access
to the internal structureof words.

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 28 Dec 2014 00:07:25 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions