The language of human temporality: Narrative schemes and cultural meanings of time

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Abstract
This paper examines “time” as a category of the mind. I argue that to talk about time and temporality is to talk about the way a semiotic fabric web is constructed. In particular, I shall deal with the linguistic construction of our ideas and concepts of time. Two levels of analysis will be outlined. On the level of the general relation between time and language, I will deal with the issue of how different languages construct different perspectives of time. On the level of the personal construction of time, I will discuss aspects of the individual's time‐synthesis. On the level of the personal construction of time, I will discuss aspects of the individual's time‐synthesis. On both levels the suggested linguistic approach to time has less to do with the grammatical aspects of language than with language seen as a system of action and of interaction. In the wake of Wittgenstein and Vygotsky, this is a view of language as a cultural system of discursive practices. Among these practices, I shall focus on what has been described as the “form of narrative.” Drawing on the analysis of an example of failed intercultural understanding, I will show that narrative works as a model of time; it constitutes a linguistic, psychological and philosophical framework for our attempts to order the diachronic dimension of our activities. To explain this view in greater detail, I will point out some techniques of the narrative “fusion” of different times, demonstrating that the form of narrative is not only the most adequate form for our most complex constructions of time (such as simultaneous scenarios of diverse times), it is the only form in which they can be expressed. As an outcome, language, and through language our concepts of time, appear as instruments that exist only in the uses to which individuals put them in this or that concrete context. Thus, the kind of study of time sketched in this article must be seen as part of a wider “cultural pragmatics” of time, a study which cannot be reducible to linguistic analyses; rather, the basic problem is that of cultural interpretation.