https://d2ng68cf36kxsk.cloudfront.net/store/public/post/875/post_images/Slide283.JPG">

There are two kinds of time, points in time and extended times. Every point of time or extended time needs to be addressed from three time perspectives: the time of the event, the time of reference, and the time of speech. This produces twelve perspectives on time that are reflected for points of time in English tenses as past perfect, simple past, present perfect, present, simple future, future perfect, and for durations in extended versions of each of these. For instance, where the future perfect is “I shall have seen John,” the extended version of this referring to a duration is “I shall have been seeing John.”¹²³ Things don’t need to get more complicated than this.

We rename and reframe Reichenbach’s schema as follows, where M is a moment, D is duration, R is the point of reference, P is the point of participation, > is sequence, and = are things happening together. Our example is the verb “to see,” expressed in English tenses.

Fig. 1.3.1(i): Past, present, and future time

Beyond tense, there are of course other markers of time in speech, such as prepositions – ubiquitously, “before,” “after,” “when,” “later,” “then,” “now,” “during,” “at,” and “in” – and most of these, terribly ambiguously, can also refer to things not related to time.

Here we find yet another point where the grammar of speaking is radically different from the grammar of text, because although words written and words spoken may seem the same, their point of participation in speech is different – always “now” in speech, but inevitably “then” in writing. This is also the case for recorded speech, when this hybrid form becomes more like text than speech. Again in this respect, text is more like image than speech.

If speech and text in their own ways have elaborate ways for representing time, what of image? For its primary spatiality and according to conventional wisdom, image seems to capture a static moment, frozen in time.

No, says E.H. Gombrich, there is never a fraction of time when movement can be absolutely stilled. Time is integral to image, but in different ways. From a logical point of view, he says, time is not made of static moments; there is continuous movement. And from a psychological point of view, “we are not cameras but rather slow registering instruments which cannot take in much at a time.” Viewing takes time.¹²⁴ Eadweard Muybridge used photography to show how artists who had been attempting to still moving objects had got time and movement wrong. His photographs revealed realities in the galloping of a horse and a man running that had not been noticed before.^§MS2.2.3a

Even in stillest image, there are always traces of movement, and so traces of time – if not in the form of explicit references such as blurring and vectors of action, then imagined positioning essential to make sense of the image – the freshness and impermanence of cut flowers in a vase, for instance, or the journey of the train in Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed.^§MS2a Which also means of course that even when an event is conceived as a moment, it is part of a duration – another transposition, always imminent, ever immanent.

If time is not directly marked in image, we cannot help ourselves but to add time-meaning in, because it is not possible to mean outside of time. Then there are objects, images, and texts that are explicitly designed to show time, often with greater clarity than speech – clocks, timelines, and timetables, for instance. And there are visual practices that explicitly represent time with particular precision, such as comic sequences, cinema, and video.¹²⁵

Here, then, is a rough map of time across the forms of meaning:

Fig. 1.3.1(ii): Moment and duration

We are referring here not only to events bound to time, because timelessness is another variant of time, outside of time but not escaping it. Logic is timeless, unless we can take logic to speak for all of time, that most expansive of durations.¹²⁶

---

¹²² M.A.K. Halliday and Christian Matthiessen, 2004, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, London: Routledge, pp. 401–03.

¹²³ Hans Reichenbach, 1947, Elements of Symbolic Logic, New York: Macmillan, pp. 287–98.

¹²⁴ E.H. Gombrich, 1964, “Moment and Movement in Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27:293–306, pp. 297, 301, 295–96.

¹²⁵ Robin Le Poidevin, 2007, The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 133–34.

¹²⁶ Ronnie Cann, 1993, Formal Semantics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 233.

---

Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 64–67. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Time §AS1.3.1