Benjamin Harbelot, Helbert Arenas, Christophe Cruz

Cognitive Science, 2005

How do we understand time and other entities we can neither touch nor see? One possibility is that we tap into our concrete, experiential knowledge, including our understanding of physical space and motion, to make sense of abstract domains such as time. To examine how pervasive an aspect of cognition this is, we investigated whether thought about a nonliteral type of motion called fictive motion (FM; as in The road runs along the coast) can influence thought about time. Our results suggest that FM uses the same structures evoked in understanding literal motion, and that these literal aspects of FM influence temporal reasoning.

Spatialization of time as a scientification strategy: Beauzée, Guillaume and the conceptual school of cognitive linguistics, 2020

The common thread interconnecting the work of Enlightenment grammarian Nicolas Beauzée (1717-1789), the typically modernist "psychomechanics" of Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960), and the conceptual school of cognitive linguistics emerging from the tumultuous 1970s American scene (e.g. George Lakoff, Leonard Talmy, Elizabeth Traugott, Ronald Langacker), is far from obvious. Yet, as I demonstrate in this essay, despite their dissimilarities these three moments in the history of linguistics exemplify a common theoretical gesture: construing grammatical time in terms of spatial concepts, which, I argue, functions in all three cases as a robust scientification strategy, meant to reinforce grammar's claim to scientificity.

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2003

In response to a recent challenge that the New B-theory of Time argues invalidly from the claim that tensed sentences have tenseless truth conditions to the conclusion that temporal reality is tenseless, I argue that while early B-theorists may have relied on some such inference, New B-theorists do not. Giving tenseless truth conditions for tensed sentences is not intended to prove that temporal reality is tenseless. Rather, it is intended to undermine the A-theorist’s move from claims about the irreducibility of tensed language to the conclusion that temporal reality must be tensed. I then examine how A-theorists have used facts about language in attempting to establish their conclusions about the nature of temporal reality. I take the recent work of William Lane Craig and argue that he implicitly and illicitly moves from facts about temporal language to his conclusion that temporal reality is tensed.

1999

ii This thesis investigates verbal and prepositional representations of change under a non-localistic analysis based on the mereology of events, i.e., a system of aspect that uses event parts as primitives in lieu of path parts. Localistic analyses, developed from motional concepts (e.g., Verkuyl 1993, Asher & Sablayrolles 1994), do not extend to non-motional data (e.g., changes of state or possession) except via metaphor, thereby bypassing essential generalizations about change. It is argued that, instead of modeling change after the tripartite source-route-goal divisions of a spatial path, the various combinations of two eventive primitives-distinguished point and distinguished process- are sufficient and necessary in accounting for abstract and concrete data, including the four aspectual verb classes of states, activities, achievements and accomplishments (Vendler 1967). The medial lexical specification, route, is shown to be unnecessary, being an epiphenomenon of two distinguish...

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 2003

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2003

I argue that the conjunction of perdurantism (the view that objects are temporally extended) and universalism (the thesis that any old class of things has a mereological fusion) gives rise to undesired complications when combined with certain plausible assumptions concerning the semantics of tensed statements.

The Journal of Space Syntax, 2012

2015

Sheffield; road networks; urban periphery; historical space; space syntax; spatial description This paper brings a range of techniques from space syntax and fractal geometry to the question of the diachronic description of spatial structures that are usually considered in purely synchronic terms. Drawing on historical research into the growth of the English industrial city of Sheffield c.1770-1905 it asks how far the spatial configuration of the city's rural hinterland (its 'parish') was implicated in the processes of social change and continuity that unfolded during this period. Time-series data on the development of Sheffield Parish is provided by the syntactical analysis of detailed historical maps, the routes taken by road-based public transport systems and contemporary newspaper reports. The data is interpreted in the light of Hillier and Iida's notion of angular, topological and metric "distance concepts " which are said to represent distinctive &...

Language Sciences, 2002