Edited by Anna Piata, Adriana Gordejuela and Daniel Alcaraz Carrión
[Human Cognitive Processing 75] 2022
► pp. 41–60
It is assumed that humans use spatial concepts to think and speak about time. In this chapter we analyze the spatialization of time in five different literary and non-literary corpora by looking at the frequency with which time units (minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and centuries) appear as the subject of a motion verb. The results reveal that there is a tendency to spatialize time more often in literature – especially in lyric poetry – than in other non-literary linguistic contexts. This supports the idea that meaning construction cannot be reduced to a direct transfer-based model, but rather requires an elaborate network of conceptual integration that opportunistically – and creatively – adjusts mappings and integrations to goals.