Time and Tense
نویسنده
چکیده
Humans conceive of time in terms of space, as shown by the language that we use to talk about temporal relations: we habitually speak of stretching out or compressing an activity, heading toward the future, returning to the past and so on (Whorf 1956, Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Binnick 1991:Chapter 1). When describing the meanings of the tenses, linguists have relied on a specific instance of the space-time analogy: the TIMELINE. The timeline is a line (or, equivalently, an ordered set of points) that is unbounded at both ends and segmented into three parts: the past, the present and the future. The points on the timeline may be times by themselves or times paired with events. While we can describe various relations among points on the timeline, only one type of relation counts as a tense relation: that which includes the time at which the linguistic act is occurring. As Lyons states (1977:682), “the crucial fact about tense [...] is that it is a deictic category. A tensed proposition, therefore, will not merely be timebound, [...] it will contain a reference to some point or period of time which cannot be identified except in terms of the zero-point of the utterance”.
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تاریخ انتشار 2007