Abstract

This dissertation discusses the influence that localism, as a philosophically and linguistically oriented paradigm, has exerted upon the study of the grammatical expression of temporal relations . Chapter 1 introduces this discussion by explicating the methodological starting points which ground the present study, in particular with respect to the monosemist approach that is proposed. In the first part of the thesis, "A critique of localism", I approach the tradition of localism primarily from a philosophical, cognitive-anthropological, and lexical-semantic perspective. Chapter 2, "The peripeties of localism", examines the philosophical roots of localism, which developed out of an idiosyncratic interpretation of Kant's statements regarding time and its relation to the notion of space. Chapter 3, then, "The conceptualization of time", discusses the spatialization of time as it is typically postulated within cognitive models in anthropology and linguistics, and more specifically by the theory of metaphor that is implicated in Lakoff's invariance hypothesis. Chapter 4, "The grammatical expression of time", functions as a pivoting point, bridging the first and second part of this thesis in its focus upon the accomplishments of localism in the realm of tense semantics. Part two, "Tense", starts with a corpus analysis of shall/will, a modal category of English which indicates a very specific interpretation of the future. To explicate the analysis, chapter 5, "reuse as an epistemic category", makes use of notions that are derived from the theory of grammaticalization and from the grounding model that is proposed in Langacker's cognitive grammar. Chapter 6, "Tense and modality", develops the terminological apparatus that is employed in the context of the preceding analysis of futurity and describes the general behavior of the tense category in English in tam that are compatible with the proposed methodology. Finally, chapter 7, "Be going to: Thinking harder about the future", extends the analysis of the grammatical expression of futurity in English and introduces a second model, 'evoked reality', which is taken as complementary with respect to the epistemic domain covered by shall/ will. In a concluding chapter, a number of philosophical and grammatical findings are recapitulated