The "Arrow Of Time" Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Gribbin (1990: 159):

Very few things in physics "care" which way time flows, and it is one of the fundamental puzzles of the universe we live in that there should be a definite "arrow of time," a distinction between the past and the future.

Blogger Comment:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, time is a construal of experience as meaning: as an inherent property of processes.  Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 113):

Whatever the mode of occurrence of any figure, it will always unfold in time.  This temporal unfolding is construed as an inherent property of the process itself, realised grammatically in tense and aspect;

Halliday (2008: 35):

The grammar of every language is (in one of its metafunctions, the ideational) a construal of human experience: it constructs our “reality” by transforming our experiences into meanings. And in doing this, the grammar often has to choose: to choose either one way of seeing things, or the other. For example, think of time. Either time is a linear progression, out of future through present into past; or else it is a translation from the virtual into the actual.

The location or extent (duration, frequency) of a process in time is construed as a circumstance of its unfolding.