Before and after: Relations of anteriority and posteriority along ‘paths’ of conceptual structure
The paper deals with the way events are ordered in a sequence with respect to each other and with respect to the speaker. When ordered with respect to each other, one event serves as the temporal reference point for establishing mental contact with another event, the target. Taking
the speaker as the reference point, events are organized on the time line around the speaker and the present moment of speaking (speech time) from which the speaker looks back at past time and forwards at future time. The event-ordering relations are studied by before and after in physical,
temporal and abstract space. Moreover, the variety of meanings of before and after is not only motivated by the spatial and nonspatial domains they extend to, but also by the different patterns and modifications of image schemas.
Keywords: anteriority/posteriority relations; event time/reference time; event-ordering relations; image-schema transformations; moving-ego/moving-time perspective; physical/abstract space
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 January 2007
- Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association
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