engleski

The primary metaphor TIME IS MOTION in English and Croatian: a psycholinguistic study

In this paper, we will be focusing on conceptual metaphors and their role in our everyday life. Conceptual metaphors describe abstract concepts using a more familiar, concrete concept, such as using the concept of a journey to describe the abstract concept of love or a love relationship as in “Our relationship has hit a dead-end street”. The aim of this paper is to see whether the conceptual metaphor TIME IS MOTION works as a metaphor in Croatian. We conducted two experiments on the students of Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. In both experiments, the participants were each given one version of the same story (the first one contained state verbs and the second one verbs of motion) and they had to answer how long did the conversation from the story last. We assumed that the conversation in the first story would be ‘shorter’ and the one in the second would be ‘longer’, because our initial hypothesis was that more time equals more motion. However, the results were obtained through t-test which showed that there is not a statistically significant difference in the mean test scores of the two sample groups. Furthermore, the participants attributed more time to the conversation from the first story which did not correlate with our hypothesis. The results actually pointed out to the phenomena of protracted duration and temporal compression. This would suggest that our conception of time is closely linked to the amount of information our brain has to process at a given time. Another important point is the use of verbs, which were both bounded and unbounded in both versions of the story.

conceptual metaphor; TIME IS MOTION; Croatian; cognitive linguistics

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