The psychological reality of spatio-temporal metaphors

Abstract

Time provides essential structure to human experience. This chapter reviews the available empirical evidence for a fundamental metaphoric structure such astime is spacein figurative language and thought. The chapter is organized into three over-arching themes:Motion through time, temporal succession, andduration estimation. A large part of the experimental evidence lends support to the psychological reality of thetime is spacemetaphor, revealing the inextricable link between conceptual metaphor in language and time perception. The review also reveals that linguistic space-time mappings may be overridden by cultural conventions, calling for further empirical cross-linguistic and cross-cultural exploration within experimental cognitive linguistics