The Time is Space metaphor: some linguistic evidence that its end is near

Abstract

In this paper the author deals with what he believes is something of a misconception, namely that there is a contemporarily viable TIME IS SPACE metaphor which allows spatial expressions to be interpreted as conveying temporal or aspectual notions. These latter notions have become too routinized to be still considered the outcome of such an 'online' mapping operation. Taking verbal particles with aspectual meanings as his material, the author argues that these meanings cannot obviously be treated as being metaphorically linked to the spatial meanings of these particles and that, moreover, the temporal uses have syntactic properties that their spatial counterparts do not have, necessitating their separate storage in the lexicon. These linguistic arguments complement some recent psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic findings about the distinctness of spatial and temporal language items.