FFF CONFERENCE CTF07

Anna Baczkowska - Temporal schemata of the English particle 'on': metonymic elaboration of the concept NOW

 

The intention of the present paper is to delineate temporal meanings encoded by the English particle ‘on’ occurring in phrasal verbs. The contexts analysed are restricted to those which express only the concept ‘now’. The meaning of ‘now’ per se, however, is dependent, as it seems, on the theoretical framework we wish to adopt, and thus it designates different spans of time for a psychologist, a neurophysiologist, a physicist and a philosopher.   To avoid confusion, in the methodology employed in our research the concept ‘now’ is replaced by a philosophical umbrella term specious ‘now’. The internal structure of specious ‘now’ is complex and it consists of three constitutive elements: the present moment as well as the immediate past and the immediate future. By adhering to this tripartite reading of ‘now’ it is possible to define ‘now’ with relative precision, as we can focus only on the part of ‘now’ which is put into the foreground (i.e. profiled) in a particular context. By so doing, on the ontological-conceptual level, mereological and metonymic nature of ‘now’ can be discerned, and, on a semantic-lexical level, a number of typical schemata of ‘on’ expressed by phrasal verbs, which encapsulate the metonymic structure of this concept, can be inferred.   Amid the meanings recognized in contexts with ‘on’ expressing ‘now’, I distinguished three main schemas: illative, ablative, and elative. Whilst illative is reserved for contexts designating subjective time protraction and elative is used of time compression sensed by a conceptualizer, ablative occupies the middle ground on the cline of subjective flow of time. The very names of these schemas come from case systems found in Latin and Finnish wherein they signal figure/ground spatial configurations. These space-determinant terms are used to discuss temporal-determinants with full awareness and with the intention to stress reciprocality and codetermination existing between space and time in the assumed spacetime continuum.    The analysis presented in this paper proves that by adhering to concepts stemming from philosophy and psychology it is cognitively viable and linguistically plausible to seek motivation of the use of temporal ‘on’ in phrasal verbs in the conceptual, metonymic, structure of the preposition. Moreover, it can be observed that there exists some valence relation between the preposition/particle and the verb in phrasal verbs, and, on a more general note, that the choice of the preposition assigned to a given verb is not arbitrary but fully explicable.

 

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