CHAPTER 3
TEMPORAL STRUCTURES: TIMELINES AND FLOWS
Time is an abstract concept and, thus, not inherently visual. Much of the terminology we use for time is based on our concrete experience of space and of the physical environment. In the seminal book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson explain that the expressions we use to describe temporal experiences in most idioms emerge from our concepts of “containers” and “moving objects.” “The ‘time is a moving object’ metaphor is based on the correlation between an object moving towards us and the time it takes to get to us. The same correlation is a basis for the ‘time is a container’ metaphor (as in ‘he did it in ten minutes’), with the bounded space traversed by the object correlated with the ...
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