Understanding Human Time (Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought)

Description

This book explores the time that we (think we) experience and the concept of time in our beliefs, our knowledge, and our fears. We believe that time passes, we know that death is inevitable, we fear that we are going to be late. How do these human feelings and sensations of time relate to metaphysical time of tenseless reality? What do different languages tell us about the nature of human time? And what exactly is the flow of time? The chapters in this volume bring together insights from linguists and philosophers to examine questions about time on the micro-level of physical reality, as well as time in language and discourse on the macro-level of social reality. The unifying theme is that in order to understand human time we have to discover not only how we think and speak about time, but also what it is that makes us think and speak about it in a certain way. Cover Contents General preface Preface The contributors 1 Introduction: Metaphysical time, human time, and time in language 2 Tense and emotion 3 An exploration into construals of subjective time in poetry 4 The 2D past 5 Counterfactuality as pragmatic inference in perspectival readings of Past Conditional utterances with modal verbs: Evidence from French 6 Avertive/frustrative markers in Australian languages: Blurring the boundaries between aspectuo-temporal and modal meanings 7 On modelling the future 8 Perceiving direction in directionless time 9 Temporal transparency and the flow of time 10 Does human time really flow? Metaindexicality, metarepresentation, and basic concepts 11 Underspecified temporal semantics in Pirah"00E3: Compositional transparency and semiotic inference References Index