Saturday 27 August 2022

The 'Arrows Of Time' Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 127):
To summarise the story so far, there seem to be at least three different arrows of time in the Universe: thermodynamic, cosmological and gravitational. Almost certainly they are linked in some way. … Whatever the resolution of the puzzle of the origin of time's arrow, there is no denying that there is an arrow, and that this provides a distinction between past and future.


Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, time specifies the location and extent of processes. Applied to physics, time is the dimension along which the unfolding of processes is measured, in terms of their location and duration.

The arrow of time, from this perspective, is simply the direction of the unfolding of a process along this axis, and the different types of 'arrows' are the different types of processes that unfold. That is, the notion of an 'arrow of time' confuses the unfolding of processes with the temporal dimension by which processes are measured.

To be clear, past and future are distinguished as the time, location and extent, before and after the time of a process of making meaning, sensing or saying.

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