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Friday, 24 June 2011

Time-Manner-Place

It's a silly thought really, but it occurred to me than in German, Time–Manner–Place states the general order of adpositional phrases in its sentences: "yesterday", "by car", "to the store". It is apparently common among languages with Subject-Object-Verb word orders.

An example of this appositional ordering in German is:

Ich fahre heute mit dem Auto nach München.
I drive today with the car to Munich.

I'm travelling to Munich by car today.
Then, I thought, well, Martin Heidegger was German and he came up with the idea that time was the horizon for human being-in-the-world. I wonder to what extent this was mediated by the language he was embedded in?