Time and text

towards an adequate heuristics

Wolfram K. Kock

pp. 113-204

in: Janos S. Petöfi, Hannes Rieser (eds), Studies in text grammar, Berlin, Springer, 1973

Abstrakt

The title I have (finally) chosen for this paper may make some readers feel a little suspicious about its purpose and content, or may even make them wonder whether it has justifiably found its way into a collection of studies in text linguistics. There have been only too many assorted publications carrying titles of the general form "Time and...", especially in this century, after some (more or less vulgarized) knowledge about Einstein's Theory of Relativity had begun to spread among philosophers, theologians, artists, writers and, of course, their satellites, literary critics. As it is a more than trivial fact that everything is connected with, or subjected to, time in some form or other, a subject of the kind of Time and..." cannot but claim to be "interesting" wherever it is chosen to be discussed, all the more so now that, instead of the ordinary word "time" one can use the learned expression "the fourth dimension" (of nature, the universe, existence, or whatever). Moreover he who has dipped into the vast stock of extant writings on Time -and no human being can, in a lifetime, do more than that -will confirm the frustrating experience of bewilderment and confusion one is beset with after going through a random sample from Sein und Zeit to Time and the Elementary Particle. One is particularly disenchanted with the discussion going on at the moment in the natural sciences ( -and rightly so, as one obviously has been looking in the wrong place), where one had hoped to find some guidance as to the "reality" of "temporal matters' that underlie -don't they? -the temporal concepts objectified in a variety of ways in the individual natural languages.¹