Issue 3, Spring 2002 http://seelrc.org/glossos/ The Slavic and East European Language Resource Center glossos@seelrc.org Laura A. Janda UNC-Chapel Hill Concepts of case and time in Slavic Introduction The Slavic languages use the semantics of case in time expressions in a variety of ways. This topic provides an opportunity to discuss the nature and role of metaphor in language, as well as sources of cross-linguistic variation. Data will be drawn primarily from Russian, Czech, and Polish (representing North Slavic), with some comparisons to other languages. This article is based upon nearly fifteen years of research on Slavic case semantics. Linguistic knowledge, including grammatical meaning, is grounded in perceptual input, determined by the parameters of human embodied experience. Through this experience we receive much more information than we can meaningfully process, and different languages emphasize, ignore, categorize, and grammaticalize this information in various ways. In addition to embodied experiences of physical surroundings, we have other experiences (emotion, imagination, deductive reasoning, abstract thought, etc.). Our understanding of concepts that do not have concrete physical realization is, via metaphor, based on our understanding of concepts that do have concrete physical realization (e.g. love is fire, deductive reasoning is a journey down a path), a process that can be viewed as both highly imperfect (the source and target domains are not identical, creating gaps and opportunities for error or variation) and highly efficient (metaphor readily facilitates grasping a whole complex of relations at once). Various linguistic communities make various decisions about the use of source domains for the understanding of abstract concepts, and these variations in the organization of knowledge teach us about the nature of human cognition, its dynamics and its limits. © 2002 The Slavic and East European Language Resource Center Glossos is the registered trademark of Duke University. All rights reserved.