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Is the future in front of us, above us or (even) under us?Analysis of French and Croatian lexemesformed with the prefixes sur-, sous-, nad- and pod-

Conceptualization of time has been for millennia one of the major questions related to the links between extralinguistic and linguistic knowledge (cf. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2016: ix). Time is an abstract domain frequently conceptualized via space according to the general TIME IS SPACE metaphor (e.g. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2016: xvii). That is one of the reasons why spatial prepositions are often used to express temporal relations (De Mulder and Vanderheyden 2002: 86). When it comes to the expression of the past and future, in numerous languages, especially those of the Western world to which French and Croatian also belong, these are dominantly conceptualized on the horizontal axis (Radden 2011: 15). This implies two specific time metaphors: FUTURE IS AHEAD and PAST IS BEHIND [the speaker], which are frequent in Croatian (e.g. Pišković 2013: 100), English (e.g. Radden 2011: 16), French (e.g. Calbris 1990), etc. Still, in a certain, much lesser number of cases, in some Indo-European languages such as English there are also examples of time conceptualization on the basis of the up – down axis (e.g. Kövecses 2006: 150), which is otherwise characteristic of East Asian languages, for instance Mandarin Chinese (Radden 2011: 4). This, however, is not surprising, as languages typically have “more than one metaphorical model of time” (Núñez and Sweetser 2006: 402). Thus, in Mandarin Chinese there are expressions such as ri-hou (day-back) meaning ‘in the future’ based on the horizontal axis (FUTURE IS BEHIND), but also those such as shàn-yuè (up-month) ‘last month’, based on the vertical axis (FUTURE IS UP) (Radden 2011: 5, 16). Similarly, in French expressions such as 6 belles journées d'aventure devant nous '6 lovely days of adventure ahead od us' are common, while there are also examples such as basse antiquité (Late Antiquity, lit. ‘low antiquity’) (Núñez and Sweetser 2006: 414), based on the metaphor LATER IS LOWER (i.e. PAST IS DOWN) construed on the vertical axis. This paper proposes a contrastive analysis of derived words expressing temporality in a Romance language (French) and a Slavic one (Croatian). Given the existence of words such as French surlendemain ‘the day after next’ and Croatian nadživjeti ‘live longer than, outlive’, formed with the prefix sur- (derived from the preposition sur ‘on’) and nad- (derived from the preposition nad ‘above’) respectively, which express time relations as conceptualized on the vertical axis, the goal of the paper is to explore whether in these two languages there are other examples of time conceptualization on the vertical axis in motivated lexemes formed with the spatial prefixes sur- ‘over-’, sous- ‘under-’, nad- ‘over-’ and pod- ‘under-’. The paper presents an analysis of prefixed nouns, verbs and adjectives with a frequency of 10 or more occurrences extracted from two large comparable web corpora, frWaC and hrWaC, yielding about a thousand lexemes. The analysis has demonstrated that in French and Croatian there are only about a dozen complex lexemes in which the future is conceptualized on the vertical axis, as being above (e.g. survivre ‘to live longer than someone’), or even as being below the speaker (e.g. podsezona ‘tourist season following the main one’). Still, it needs to be emphasized that many of these lexemes carry the ‘posteriority’/’anteriority’ meaning only as a secondary meaning. For example, the French noun surinfection ‘superinfection’, defined as “a second infection superimposed on an earlier one (especially by a different microbial agent) “, carries a temporal meaning element ‘posterior’ indicated by the prefix sur-, but this meaning is only secondary to the meaning ‘additional’ primarily expressed by the prefix. Having found only a small number of French and Croatian complex words denoting temporality conceptualized on a vertical basis, this study is in line with the extant literature claiming that Indo-European languages have a predominantly horizontal conceptualization of time with possible less numerous exceptions of its conceptualization on the vertical axis.

time conceptualization, metaphor, French, Croatian

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