Language as a reflection of mental time travel

The ability to describe time is crucial for effective communication. It is used to describe causality, to plan and to relay stories. Our perception of time is reflected by its reification in language. Similarly, we know that language affects our thinking and perception. Therefore, the various tense and aspect systems across human languages, each with commonalities and variances, reflect both universal and cultural impressions of time in an empirical and measurable way. Models exist for time in language that roughly match proposals for human understanding of time. For example, Reichenbach proposes tense and aspect as a composition of three conceptual temporal points – event time, speech time, and a reference time; this is borne out by statistical evidence in corpora. Through examples and data-driven study, this poster shows that language is an important resource for studying mental models of time.