Powerful rhyme and sluttish time: A cross-linguistic study of time personification in poetic discourse

Abstract

Despite the exponential growth of metaphor studies in recent decades, personification has nonetheless remained overshadowed by other types of metaphor. Specifically, it has been suggested that not all personifications are equal in that they vary considerably in linguistic, conceptual and communicative terms. In this paper, we argue that personification indeed features cultural diversity and stylistic creativity, yet its expression is underpinned by a shared conceptual structure along the lines of a generic integration template. Drawing on data from poetic discourse, we focus on a particular domain, that of time, and its various personified manifestations in four languages (English, Modern Greek, French and Spanish). We show that time personification is grounded in an Abstract Cause Personification template, in which the cause of an event is mapped onto an agent that performs an action that results in that same event (e.g., ‘cancer killed him’). This causal tautology (that in the case of time amounts to the time is a changer metaphor) can then be further blended with yet another agent, which acts in a more concrete scenario (e.g., ‘Time is a great healer’). In the case of time, in particular, the cross-linguistic evidence we examine points to a generic personified construal that we dub Time the Enemy (cf. Death the Grim Reaper and Eros the Archer).