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Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity
Edited by Anna Piata, Adriana Gordejuela and Daniel Alcaraz Carrión
[Human Cognitive Processing 75] 2022
► pp. 61–80

Chapter 3
What is time?

Verbal creativity in copula constructions

| University of Neuchâtel | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

The focus of this chapter is on poetic metaphors of time that appear in so-called equations, that is, copula constructions of the form ‘NP be NP’. While metaphorical creativity of time has been extensively and thoroughly studied, research on such metaphors is rather limited and mostly associated with image metaphors. Based on data from the English PoetiCog corpus, this chapter demonstrates that these metaphors activate mental imagery (as previously assumed) but due to the constructional pattern of equations they also directly evoke the source of the metaphorical mapping. This posits a challenge for their understanding, which I argue to tap into a process of mental simulation along the lines of embodied semantics.

Keywords: embodied semantics, equations, imagery, poetic metaphor
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Copula constructions: From everyday speech to poetic discourse
  • 3.The data
  • 4.What is time?: Evidence from poetry
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.75.03pia
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