PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF THE CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR „TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY“ IN SERBIAN AND ENGLISH

Abstract

The conceptual metaphor time is money/ (valuable) commodity is considered to be fairly new and its origins are a matter of debate. Some researchers believe that cultural changes brought about this particular conceptualization, while others claim that the inherent finiteness of time is the basis for viewing time as something valuable. The aim of this paper is to examine the pragmatic aspects of concretizations of the said metaphor in Serbian and English. Namely we aim to investigate, within the framework of cognitive-inferential pragmatics, the possibility of certain expressions being an instance of descriptive and/or interpretative use of language. The theoretical framework is relevance theory and two approaches to metaphoric expressions taken into account are explicature analysis and modified explicature analysis. The analysis comprises examples of conceptual metaphors time is a (limited) resource (since we believe it serves as a basis for further elaboration and profiling value when it comes to mapping on the examined target domain) and time is a valuable commodity with special attention dedicated to examples of the conceptual metaphor time is money. The results show that speakers of English and Serbian conceptualize time in a similar way when it comes to the source domains resource and valuable commodity (attested metaphors include time has a price, time is for sale, etc.). When it comes to the pragmatic aspects of our analysis, the results point to the adequacy of both interpretative and descriptive approach to the interpretation of metaphoric expressions, depending on the entrenchment and routinization of an expression.