What is time (and why should linguists care about it)?

Abstract

An indisputable fact of life and of nature is that humans and human institutions necessarily both exist in and live through time. The importance of this fact and the conscious recognition of it is reflected in the concern for the passage of time and for humans' place vis-à-vis time observable in various sorts of artistic expression, from the visual arts such as sculpture and painting to various reflections in literary and even musical sources. Taking the arts as my point of departure, I first outline here and then contrast different views of time from within different domains and disciplines and from different vantage points, discussing in turn the artist's, the physicist's, the linguist's, and, ultimately, the ordinary speaker's view of time. I then contrast continuity across time with change across time, and illustrate continuity amidst change through an extended case study of the past-tense marker in Indo-European languages known as the 'augment', examining its stability and change throughout all of attested Greek, from Mycenaean Greek of the second millennium bc up through Modern Greek of the present day, with particular focus on its realization in certain regional dialects of the modern language. The augment thus provides an important object lesson in linguistic continuity and change, as it proves to be a remarkably durable but at the same time intriguingly elastic morpheme, at least as far as Greek is concerned. Since the view of time that I ultimately dwell on leads me to a consideration of time and history, I end with some observations on both the history of the field and my own personal history.*

Flowing Time: Emergentism and Linguistic Diversity

“…. ' Joseph (2020, p. 913) [28] Cultural outputs, social interactions, and, on the level of argumentation, philosophical literature continue to corroborate the conviction that it is in the essence of human nature to think of time as flowing. Arguably, we conceptualise time as flowing because of the feeling or experience of either a flow, or at least of a change, or of the effects that eventualities have on each other-or perhaps something else altogether that has the power of eliciting such a concept of passing time.…”