Adolescents’ use of spatial TIME metaphors: A matter of cognition or sociocommunicative practice?

Abstract

The present article maps out the spontaneous use of spatial TIME metaphors in the language of older children and adolescents. The goal is to uncover if and how types of spatial TIME metaphors and the metaphorical strength of their tokens develop across time. To this end, the language of three age groups, namely 10–13 years, 14–16 years and 17–19 years, is compared. The categorical framework for the assessment of the metaphorical strength centers on the syntagmatic co-occurrence of multi-word units. This concept integrates both cognitive and social communicative factors such as entrenchment and frequency of use, and helps to explain differing levels of metaphorical strength in novel, creative and highly conventionalized metaphors. The results, based on an exhaustive qualitative analysis of the used corpus, show that all speakers, irrespective of their developmental stage, use only highly conventionalized metaphors such as long time or on Monday. These findings suggest that to explain the (developing) usage of spatial TIME metaphors, we must turn more to sociocommunicative practices and lexical co-occurrences than to purely cognitive accounts as found in Conceptual Metaphor Theory.