Re: future past:Rihana-ye

David Peterson wrote:
>For the strange, of course, there's always English.   Consider that "after"
>means "towards the aft", or "behind", and "before" means "in front of"
>or "ahead".   Yet, temporally, "after" means further in time, and "before"
>means earlier in time, whereas all the rest of the English metaphors
>work in *exactly* the opposite way: "Let's leave that meeting behind us,
>and move on ahead to our next meeting."
Having just yesterday finished Lakoff and Johnson's 'Metaphors We Live By',
I give their account with the zeal, and probably the inaccuracy, of the
convert. :)

According to them, there are two distinct metaphors at work.  One
relates to the speaker moving through time as through space, hence
'That's all behind us now' = 'That's in our past'.  The other relates to
*events* moving through time, with the speaker conceptualised as the
motionless centre relative to which the events move.  Events necessarily
move from future to past - unlike the speaker, who moves from past to
future.  Events are therefore thought of as facing towards us, as moving
towards and facing the past.  So, in a sequence of events, the first to
arrive are 'before' = in front of the others.

The tension, and its resolution, can be felt in the pair of sentences:
'He awoke on the day before the exam.  The exam lay before him.'
Was he before the exam or was the exam before him?  Both - they are
facing each other.

Jonathan.

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