Conceptual metaphor and the temporality therein

Abstract Much of human cognition about time would not be possible without the mechanisms of conceptual metaphor. At the same time, much of how we cognitively process metaphor is intimately tied to the conceived temporal profiles of a given source and target domain, i.e., to the temporality inherent in metaphor itself. This inherent temporality of metaphors is what the chapter deals with, specifically in the framework of the multi-level view of conceptual metaphor ( Kövecses 2017 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 ). The aim is to determine what roles different conceptual structures (i.e. image schemas, domains, frames, and mental spaces) may have in construing the temporal configurations of conceptual material that are essential for metaphorical mappings, as well as to determine how these conceptual structures are tied to the operations of mental scanning.