Lingual Appresentations of Material Experiences of Time: The Relationship of Object-Aesthetic and Social Sense in Temporal Metaphors
The adage »Grass does not grow more quickly if you pull on it« adorns a German parking garage. It evokes two distinct experiences: In an immediate and almost visceral way, the quasi-material, aesthetic experience of tearing grass leaves is present, although not contained in the propositional structure of the sentence. At the same time, one understands the sentence in its social-contextual sense as a metaphorical criticism: Whoever rushes things will destroy them.
The interdisciplinary project of cooperation between sociology and linguistics examines the relationship between these two planes of temporality by means of four interconnected key questions:
- How does the use of temporal metaphors realize object-aesthetic manners of experience – especially object-aesthetic »Eigenzeiten« (»proper times«) – in terms of pragmatics, imbuing them with social meaning?
- How are temporal metaphors of this kind integrated into the cultural and institutional practices of contemporary societies?
- Which processes have influenced the metaphorical structure of language and language practices since the eighteenth century?
- What insights into the change of material, temporal and social relations to the world in late modern society can be gleaned from quality and quantity of temporal metaphors on account of their characteristic »double-coding« (object-aesthetic and social sense)?