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Time Representations in the Perspective of Human CreativityEdited by Anna Piata, Adriana Gordejuela and Daniel Alcaraz Carrión
[Human Cognitive Processing 75] 2022
► pp. 15–40
Motion-based metaphors of time have been thoroughly discussed in the literature, but some aspects still remain underexplored. The present chapter addresses one of these areas, namely, the lexical richness of the motion verbs found in temporal expressions. We present the findings of a corpus study of motion expressions of time in television news. Using a large set of data, we show that motion verbs that are not conventionally associated with the expression of time, such as crawl and roll, are used alongside the more typical ones (e.g., come, approach). The results suggest that language users are in fact far more creative than it has been assumed so far, thus challenging what is typically perceived as an everyday metaphor of time.