Cognitive linguists have produced a wide range of insights into how language reveals emotions and human concepts of space and time. Backed by neuroscience, they stress that physical sensations, moods and feelings affect the perception of time. This approach therefore allows to analyze time-related emotions inscribed into a text.
Cognitive linguists stress the importance of figurative language for the representation of abstract concepts such as time. This is called CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY (CMT) (cf. Lakoff/Johnson 1999). Studies have shown that the abstract concept of “time” is often described metaphorically by using “spatial labels” and is thus mapped by the conceptual metaphor TIME IS SPACE (Lakoff/Johnson 1999; Boroditsky 2000; Langacker 2006; Moore 2006). This also applies to the Japanese language by exhibiting peculiar specifications. Onodera (2018) for instance has shown that cognitive linguistics allows to analyze the different ways through which temporal terms and their lexical domains in medieval Japanese literature are conceptually mapped and emotionally charged. It can be determined, whether time is, for instance, mapped as movement in space or as a commodity in specific works or genres, whether “moving time metaphors (MTM),” “moving observer (ego) metaphors (MOM),” or “sequence is position on a path metaphors” (Moore 2006) dominate, which categories of spatial metaphors (containment, support, verticality, contiguity, cf. Levinson 2003) or lexical concepts of time (duration, moment, instance, event, matrix, agentive, measurement-time, commodity, cf. Evans 2004a) are used to describe time-related emotions, and in which cases temporal metaphors are used as “avoidance mechanisms” (Blumenberg [1979] 2014) to blur reality. As metaphors work with the cultural and aesthetic repertoire available to the text’s audience in a specific period in time, their analysis allows to decode specific worldviews and social structures. Moreover, cognitive linguistics supports the analysis of intricate temporal relations through variations and combinations of aspect, tense, and temporal information by implicit clause order (Dowty 1986; Halliday/Matthiessen [1989] 2014).
