One of the most enigmatic aspects of experience concerns time. Since pre-Socratic times scholars have speculated about the nature of time, asking questions such as: What is time? Where does it come from? Where does it go? The central proposal of The Structure of Time is that time, at base, constitutes a phenomenologically real experience. Drawing on findings in psychology, neuroscience, and utilising the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this work argues that our experience of time may ultimately derive from perceptual processes, which in turn enable us to perceive events. As such, temporal experience is a pre-requisite for abilities such as event perception and comparison, rather than an abstraction based on such phenomena. The book represents an examination of the nature of temporal cognition, with two foci: i) an investigation into (pre-conceptual) temporal experience, and ii) an analysis of temporal structure at the conceptual level (which derives from temporal experience).

Table of contents

Acknowledgements ix I. Orientation 1. The problem of time 3–11 2. The phenomenology of time 13–32 3. The elaboration of temporal concepts 33–37 4. The nature of meaning 39–56 5. The conceptual metaphor approach to time 57–77 6. A theory of word-meaning: Principled polysemy 79–104 II. Concepts for time 7. The Duration Sense 107–121 8. The Moment Sense 123–130 9. The Instance Sense 131–134 10. The Event Sense 135–140 11. The Matrix Sense 141–157 12. The Agentive Sense 159–167 13. The Measurement-system Sense 169–176 14. The Commodity Sense 177–183 15. The Present, Past and Future 185–198 III. Models for time 16. Time, motion and agency 201–210 17. Two complex cognitive models of temporality 211–226 18. A third complex model of temporality 227–236 19. Time in modern physics 237–249 20. The structure of time 251–254 Notes 255 References 269 Index 277