Language and Time
A Cognitive Linguistics Approach

Vyvyan Evans focuses on the linguistic and conceptual resources we make use of when we fix events in time.

Vyvyan Evans (Author)

9781107043800, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 October 2013

286 pages, 32 b/w illus. 28 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.55 kg

'Vyvyan Evans's Language and Time is a product of this newly found confidence in the field of cognitive science. It is an important work that expands Evans's earlier studies dealing with lexical concepts for time (The Structure of Time, 2004) and his Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models, LCCM for short (How Words Mean, 2009), and an ambitious enterprise of applying his LCCM to a specific area of investigation, taking us into the complexities of the use of language and thought to place events in time, or temporal reference.' Anca M. Nemoianu, KronoScope

Using language and thought to fix events in time is one of the most complex computational feats that humans perform. In the first book-length taxonomy of temporal frames of reference, Vyvyan Evans provides an overview of the role of space in structuring human representations of time. Challenging the assumption that time is straightforwardly structured in terms of space, he shows that while space is important for temporal representation, time is nevertheless separate and distinguishable from it. Evans argues for three distinct temporal frames of reference in language and cognition and evaluates the nature of temporal reference from a cross-linguistic perspective. His central thesis is that the hallmark of temporal reference is transience, a property unique to the domain of time. This important study has implications not only for the relationship between space and time, but also for that between language and figurative thought, and the nature of linguistically-mediated meaning construction.

Part I. Orientation: 1. Introduction
2. Access semantics
3. The nature of temporal reference
Part II. Temporal Frames of Reference: 4. Deictic temporal reference
5. Sequential temporal reference
6. Extrinsic temporal reference
7. Time versus space
Part III. Meaning Construction and Temporal Reference: 8. Conceptual metaphors and lexical concepts
9. Figurative meaning construction in LCCM theory
10. Semantic affordances and temporal reference
11. Universals and diversity in the cross-linguistic representation of time.

Subject Areas: Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Anthropology [JHM], Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Psycholinguistics [CFD], Linguistics [CF]