The Language Hourglass: Language and the Representation of Time

A story in the Independent from a few months ago reported a study by Lancaster University and Stockholm University that found, according to the headline on Lancaster’s web site, ‘Language shapes how the brain perceives time’. The underlying principle behind the study was Whorfian linguistic relativity, or the idea that one’s language shapes one’s experience of reality. This study stood out to me because Whorfianism and cognitive metaphors are the areas in linguistics I find particularly fascinating, and because it made an interesting claim about the way in which bilingual people experience time: as someone who speaks (albeit to extremely varying degrees of fluency) four, maybe five, or at a stretch six languages, I thought the claims it made posed some interesting questions about the way I think when exposed to different linguistic contexts.

One prevalent trend in conceptual metaphors is to use a concrete source for a metaphor to represent an abstract target (like, for example, using distance or volume to represent time) (see Lakoff and Johnson). The Whorfian principle, named after Benjamin Lee Whorf, suggests that the metaphors we use to describe time would either, in the weaker version, influence the way in which we interpret time or, in the stronger version, determine and delimit the way in which we perceive it: our understanding of these ideas is relative to our language. Emmanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopulos put this relativistic principle to the test in their study of how Spanish and Swedish speakers understand time.

The study involved having native Spanish and Swedish speakers as well as bilingual speakers of both languages reproduce the duration of a certain animation, either a container filling with liquid or a line growing in length. Spanish and Swedish represent time differently: the former uses metaphors of quantity to represent duration while Swedish speakers use metaphors of length (Bylund and Athanasopulos 912). After watching the animation, the participants had to report its duration. What Bylund and Athanasopulos were examining is whether or not there was any interference between the kind of quantity their animation was presenting (volume or length) with the cognitive metaphors used by the speakers of the respective languages, and whether it would affect their perception of the duration of the event.

The findings of the study were that linguistic stimuli can condition people to think of time differently depending on the metaphors used to represent duration in that language. There was interference when Swedish speakers were given the task of reporting the duration when played the animation of the line, and likewise for the Spanish speakers when played the animation of the container: when they were given a visual cue that corresponded to the metaphors they tended to use in their native language to represent time, their estimates of duration were thrown off and they were significantly inaccurate with their reporting of it. However, this interference only occurred when they were conditioned by a linguistic prompt: they were given the prompt with a verbal label, using the respective words in Swedish or Spanish for duration (tid/duración), distance (avstånd/distancia) or amount (mängd/ cantidad). In the absence of these labels and verbal prompts, there was no discernible interference: their reporting of duration was much more accurate than when there was such a stimulus (Bylund and Athanasopulos 913-4). So it is the linguistic cue that conditioned a different representation of duration.

The made a further point about bilinguals. Speakers of both Swedish and Spanish could adapt to either condition: if they were prompted in Spanish, they would show interference when shown the container animation, and if they were prompted in Swedish, they would show interference when shown the line. This was the conclusion that garnered the headline in the Independent that ‘Bilingual speakers experience time differently from people who only speak one language’. This headline is somewhat inaccurate: a more appropriate characterisation would be that speakers of different languages represent time differently, and bilinguals can adapt depending on their linguistic context.

This got me thinking about what I do whenever I think of time in different linguistic contexts. It probably wasn’t a plausible explanation of why Christmas felt so long whenever I went back to India. But for the most part, while speaking English, I am used to using length to describe time: ‘long time’, ‘short meeting’, et cetera, and perhaps the same with German. My knowledge of Bengali, Oriya and Hindi aren’t good enough for me to have a rigorous, reflexive analysis of the kinds of metaphors that are used to represent duration. Given my limited knowledge, I am tempted to say that the cognitive metaphors vary depending on context: events (such as days or meetings) can be long or short; however, when it comes to quantifying time, I tend to use metaphors of magnitude (অনেক সময়, बहुत समय). But I could be mistaken.

These discussions seem to support weak Whorfianism: the linguistic stimuli and contexts merely influence the strategies one uses to represent duration. The fact that there is no cognitive interference in the representation of duration by length or volume problems in the absence of linguistic stimuli suggests that the perception of duration is not innate but is conditioned by the language one uses. So language does not determine one’s experience of time itself, but one’s conceptual understanding and depiction of it.

What I am curious about is whether or not these conclusions and Whorfianism in general can support a much stronger claim, not just ‘strong Whorfianism’ (that language constructs our experience of time), but an even further claim that our ontological categories of time and its topology are further shaped by language. This is a more difficult problem, about which I know very little. I wonder if, for example, there is a relation between thinking of time in terms of distance and imagining time as a linear, orthogonal dimension of spacetime, or a similar relation between thinking of time in terms of volume and as something that flows. Another study showed that English speakers tend to see time as horizontal, whereas Chinese speakers talk about time on the horizontal, sagittal or vertical axes (See Gu, et al.). This problem gets especially complicated when we consider that people are able to imagine concepts that are outside of their language or linguistic backgrounds. Regardless of one’s innate language, one can adopt these different positions on the metaphysics of time independently of the metaphors that are conventionally used in language. One can even learn to speak of time differently depending on one’s views. Moreover, these approaches to time have never quite reflected on the origin of these intuitions or their linguistic backgrounds.

Then there is a further problem of priority: is it our language that shapes these ontological notions of time, or do our ontologies of time inform our language and its metaphors? Based on superficial, broad-brushed differences between notions, time in Hindu cosmology is cyclical compared to the linear arrow of time in the west (again, this is merely a superficial picture, and the details are a much more complex mosaic in either case with varied and contradictory accounts). But then the word for ‘tomorrow’ and ‘today’ in Hindi, Bengali, Oriya (probably Devanagari languages more generally) are the same, literally meaning ‘one day from now’, with the context and tense agreement determining whether this is a day in the past or future. Would this characteristic of language condition one to have a cyclical ontology of time, or do these languages reflect a pre-existing metaphysical belief that shares an origin with this language?

Perhaps this search for a relationship between the linguistic categories that shape our perception of time to a much deeper ontological position is too ambitious. But there is a scope for this discussion to go beyond just the psycholinguistic. Kasia Jaszczolt has a forthcoming paper that presents a compelling analysis of the relationship between tense in natural language, a perspectival epistemology of time and, consequently, a metaphysics of time that is composed of degrees of epistemic modality. This is something I have not yet pursued in much detail and currently know little about. Nevertheless, this problem of the subject being at the centre of the experience of time is germane to post-Kantian western philosophy: if time is a category that is innate to the understanding, then the way in which we understand time becomes central to our notion of its ontology. If language reflects the ontology and only conditions or influences one’s experience (as per weak Whorfianism), then we can use the body of metaphors in our language to ground our intuitions of time. But if our understanding of time is determined by language (as per strong Whorfianism), then language becomes even more central to ontology, and this problem becomes infinitely more interesting.

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Maria Dokov(ov)a for her insightful and illuminating comments and for all the valuable material which I have tried to incorporate in this piece as best I could. I would also like to thank her for her consistent and unfailing readership.

Works Cited:

Blair, Olivia. ‘Bilingual Speakers Experience Time Differently from People who Speak Only One Language’. The Independent 3 May 2017. Web. 2 Aug. 2017.

Bylund, Emmanuel and Panos Athanasopulos. ‘The Whorfian Time Warp: Representing Duration Through the Language Hourglass.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 146.7 (2017): 911-6. Web. 2 Aug. 2017. DOI: 10.1037/xge0000314.

Gu, Yan, et al. ‘Does Language Shape the Production and Perception of Gestures? A Study on late Chinese-English Bilinguals’ Conception of Time.’ Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 36 (2014): 547-552. Web. 3 Aug. 2017.

‘Language Shapes How the Brain Perceives Time.’ Lancaster University. 26 Apr. 2017. Web. 2 Aug. 2017. < http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/articles/2017/languageshapes-how-the-brain-perceives-time/ >

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1980. Print.