Time Is on Our Side: Temporal Agency in Courtship Narratives

ABSTRACT

The reported study investigated how newlyweds linguistically encode changes in relationship commitment in retrospective courtship narratives. In particular, we explored their use of emotion words and its correspondence with “temporal agency,” that is, the attribution of temporal change to human actors or to abstract events and processes. A corpus of courtship narratives composed by recently married participants was analyzed. Narrators used a higher frequency of positive emotion terms (e.g., wonderful) and human temporal agency assignments (e.g., We spent Thanksgiving together) to describe episodes they associated with an increase in relationship commitment from others they associated with a decrease. When describing increases in commitment, their expression of positive emotion partially mediated human temporal agency assignments. However, they did not use significantly more negative emotion words (e.g., sad) or abstract temporal agency assignments (e.g., Our relationship went through a tough period) to describe decreases in commitment than increases. The implications of these findings for relational discourse analysis and embodiment theory are considered.

Acknowledgment

We gratefully thank Audrey Leroux for the statistical assistance. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers and the editor, David Rapp, for their insightful comments and suggestions on a previous draft of this article.

Funding

The study herein reported is a secondary analysis of research supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH 33938) to Ted L. Huston.