Abstract

It is widely held that temporal morphemes refer to temporal structures of reality in the way presented by Reichenbach in his Symbolic Logic (1947). One of the earliest elaborations of the concept of time, namely the one found in Aristotle’s Physics, however, suggests that time is not a property of nature, but a complex linguistic elaboration of the human mind in order to come to terms with nature: Counting deictic focusing acts with respect to repeated constellations of a reference movement, e. g., meridian transits of the sun, the human psyche establishes a refer-ence space that has no reality outside the human psyche. Because of this it is argued that it is quite implausible that grammatical morphemes should express a complex notion that relies on things such as number and a numeral system, but, rather, that it is later reifications of the concept of time gave rise to the assumption that linguistic structures encode temporal logic. As it will be shown, ‘temporal’ morphemes of German can indeed be described without reference to time, as they have a much more basic meaning. Hence it may be meaningful to ask the question, if linguistic thinking might in general be misled in believing that complex categories such as time or, for instance, causality, are encoded in grammatical structures.