ABSTRACT
Many of English's many word-referencing words take the form of metaphors; these can help shape our perceptions and actions, often without us being aware of them. One example is the ‘Time is Money’ metaphor, widely used in Western, capitalist countries, where work is typically associated with the time it takes and where time is precisely measured. Spending money and spending time both involve an exchange: for goods/services/activities; it's this exchange (what they enable us to do) that determines their value. Both relativity theories and our everyday experience equate time with space. Lakoff and Johnson discuss conceptual metaphors, such as (i) time orientation and (ii) metaphorical motion; the latter involves moving time and moving observer, which can help explain the ambiguity of sentences such as ‘Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward two days’. Pinker discusses how time can be related to space through implicit metaphors (such as time is space) and through the semantics of tense and verbs. Language appears to be organized by Kantian abstract (a priori) categories.
